Work Text:
The alarm clock reads 9:54 in digital green. It’s a sticky Sunday morning, and Jisung’s just awoken, fresh out of a galactic sci-fi dreamscape where his girlfriend had played a part-alien vixen with lavender skin and curling horns and eyeballs like inky marbles. She—Yeji—had already been awake beside him when he’d snorted himself into consciousness, his hot morning wood pressed against her backside. She’d been pirating whatever’s new on HBO on Jisung’s shitty laptop, set up on his desk chair a few feet from the bed, and she’d also been, well, hornless and tanned, though he’s yet to look her in the eye, so no confirmation on that front. But Jisung takes nothing for granted, even if the show’s still playing now as he spoons her, fucking into her lazily, rolling her nipples between his fingertips. His eyes are closed and his awareness is still clouded by sleep but from how Yeji’s responding—or, rather, how she isn’t—he reckons she’s actually focused on the show, where he’s vaguely certain a few unconvincingly mature-looking high schoolers are engaged in a threesome.
“Have you ever thought about it?” muses Yeji. For all her casualness, she could be talking about the weather—which is shit, by the way. The janky air conditioning grants no illusions, and it’d looked overcast outside, threateningly stormy, even, when Jisung had last cracked open his eyes. He’d typically prefer to not unstick his eyelids prior to noon, but… the aliens came calling.
Anyhow, Yeji’s not talking about the weather. At least, when Jisung grunts questioningly, she supplies, “A threesome? You, me, someone else?”
Jisung wrinkles his nose, trails his hand down her soft body, down between her legs. “I mean—I guess?” he mutters, trailing off into a yawn that cracks his jaw.
“It could be fun,” Yeji says thoughtfully. Her voice finally wavers a bit as Jisung presses his fingers against her clit. “N-no matter the third party. Could be hot with another guy, since we’re both—Jesus, Sung, when did you last cut your nails?”
“Can’t remember,” Jisung mutters, hand drifting back up to her stomach. Then his eyes pop open, assaulted by grayish sunlight (he’d forgotten to close the curtains last night) and a few weeks’ worth of laundry (he’s been an adult for long enough that his mom’s stopped nagging him about laundry—she calls it surrender, Jisung calls it independence). “Wait, what were you gonna say?”
“Hm?” The characters are conversing on-screen and Yeji is engrossed.
“We’re both,” Jisung huffs, and he grips her hipbone, picks up the pace he’d lost. “We’re both what?”
“We’re both into men,” Yeji says, like it’s a fact. Like the sky’s blue, or her high school GPA was a 3.9.
“What?!” Jisung croaks, and he’s zoned out on the laptop screen when he realizes this perhaps isn’t an argument to be had while still inside her.
As he starts to shift, Yeji sighs out, “Wasn’t gonna happen this morning, anyway, Sung.”
Jisung thinks he could’ve managed, or at least put in a valiant effort for her. “Rewind a few seconds,” he tells her, redirecting the conversation and propping himself up on his elbow.
“What? I didn’t think you were watching,” says Yeji, eyes still glued to the laptop. Her orangey hair is in a nearly-undone bun right at the top of her head, and she wrinkles her nose cutely enough for Jisung to forgive her for half-pretending he doesn’t exist. Then she catches on, peers back at him. “Oh. I mean, I guess it’s not a conversation we’ve ever actually had, but—am I wrong?”
Jisung gapes at the expectant quirk of Yeji’s brow. “About me being gay?” He gestures wildly between the two of them. “I would hope so!”
Yeji rolls her eyes back to the show. “Don’t be stupid.” She aims a kick at his shin with her heel. “It’s possible to like me and dudes, Jisung. But, like, honestly, figures you’d get all no-homo and defensive so, like. Forget I ever brought it up.”
Jisung’s eyes bulge out of his head. “Wh—I’m not homophobic!” he cries, though when he mentally replays her words, he cringes at the utter lack of accusation there. “Anyway, I’m—I’m not defensive, I’m just. Confused. How long have you thought… that?” He blinks. He’s twenty-three now. He and Yeji have been going steady since they were fourteen. And she’s never thought to voice—
“I mean… long as I can remember,” mutters Yeji. She cranes her arm out to tap the volume button on the laptop and turn it up. “It’s not a big deal. I just read you wrong. Let’s just leave it at that.”
The terrifying thought—not that it’d be terrible to be, like, bi or whatever, no, it’s just that Jisung’s never thought about it, he swears on his baby’s-first-plushie—that Yeji knows him better than nearly anyone else is what really prods at him. He rubs at his tired eyes, gone out of focus on the windows. “Do I… give off a vibe, or something?”
“Vibe?” Yeji snorts. She waits until the action’s over on the screen to say, “You’re gonna tell me you were never into Minho? Even a little?”
Jisung sits up, sheets tossed aside. Boner out. He must look ridiculous, probably bed-headed, too, because Yeji is the picture of amusement as she turns toward his commotion. “Minho’s my best friend!” he yawps.
“And?” Yeji chuckles. “You went as his date to his senior prom.”
“Only ‘cos he didn’t want to go with that dick Juyeon who asked him!” Jisung rakes his fingers through his hair so aggressively it hurts his scalp. “And—”
“And it was just as bros. Yeah, I get it.” Yeji’s still smiling to herself as she rolls out of bed, hits pause on the show.
Jisung resents her for stealing the words right out of his mouth. “That’s not what I was gonna say.”
She looks to consider stealing one of the many shirts strewn around Jisung’s room, then thinks better of it. Jisung can’t blame her. They’re probably well on their way to decomposing into the wall-to-wall carpet.
She’s slipping into yesterday’s clothes when Jisung—actively trying not to pout though it seeps into his voice—asks, “Why would you think I’ve had feelings for someone else?”
Yeji twirls to face him, gives him a quick scan. Her lips purse and her brows slant with endearment, and she tousles Jisung’s hair as she goes to unplug her phone. “Not feelings. You can be in a relationship and feel attracted to other people sometimes, Sung,” she says. “Most of the time, I’d say it’s… perfectly harmless.” She smiles, leans over the messy sheets to kiss him on the cheek. “Anyway, intermediate ballet at eleven.”
“Enseignez bien, mademoiselle,” Jisung mutters to his lap. His phone vibrates noisily on his nightstand, and he snatches it up, feels a smile spread across his cheeks before he’s managed to read a whole three words. “Minho’s coming home next week.”
“Good.” Yeji hangs onto his doorknob. “Whenever I run into his mom at ShopRite, she always badgers me about him as if I’d know how he’s doing.”
Jisung's brow creases, but it smoothes out when he rereads Minho’s text. “Why doesn’t she just ask me?”
“‘Cos you’re a lazy ass who never runs his mom’s errands. Hence, no ShopRite.” The bedroom door clicks shut behind Yeji.
Jisung flops backward onto his mattress, stares at the ceiling. Pulls up Minho’s text again.
wifey
you’re picking me up from the bus station monday check yes ☑️ or yes ☑️
His lips quirk. Minho hasn’t been home since early last winter, and even then, he’d left long before New Year’s. They’re now deep into July.
if lost return to wifey
the boxes are already checked ?
Minho’s response comes swiftly.
wifey
there’s no empty checkbox emoji
if lost return to wifey
can you least bring me a nyc souvenir 🥰❤️
wifey
yes
it’s called quality time
with me
if lost return to wifey
😔
wifey loved “😔”
After a long while of zoning out on the little heart shape, Jisung snaps to alertness, opens up his messages with Yeji.
hanniebun
wait
who have you been attracted to that isn’t me???????
other wifey
go cut ur nails
Now that the sun’s set, just the stragglers remain on the beach. It’s only a matter of time until the high school kids show up and leave their litter everywhere (90% White Claw cans) and try (and fail) to start a bonfire, but it’s precisely this limbo of dusk that Jisung likes most, when the sun’s disappeared but the horizon’s still haloed in pink and—and a shade of orange bizarrely close to that of the creamsicle Minho’s sucking on.
It’s the creamsicle that Jisung’s looking at when he realizes Minho’s observing him critically. He’s already finished his own ice cream, popsicle stick abandoned on the blanket. “What?”
Minho sucks noisily at his popsicle, pulls it away, smacks his lips as he licks them clean. “Mm.” He reaches out, gives Jisung’s arm a poke. “You’ve been working out.”
“What?” Jisung schools his features, frowns down at his arm. “No I haven’t.”
Minho snorts. “Yeah, you have.”
“Nope.” Jisung looks toward the water. “At least… I don’t recall.”
“You don’t recall.” Minho grins, punches Jisung in the arm. “Why are you trying to lie? Don’t you want your hard work validated?”
“Why can’t you accept that I just look like this? It’s natural… natural tone.”
When Minho tackles him, Jisung sees it coming. However, he doesn’t quite see Minho smashing his spit-melted ice cream into Jisung’s face, smearing its vanilla ice cream core all over his mouth and cheeks.
Jisung hollers—only at first, out of shock. But then he just feels pitiful with sand in his hair and ice cream on his face as he squints up at Minho, who’s sat atop him, satisfied.
Minho returns to finishing his smashed-up ice cream. Jisung surrenders with a weak laugh, wiping his cheeks with his hand, then that on Minho’s shorts.
“Your face’ll be sticky if you don’t lick it away,” Minho informs him. He’s heavy in Jisung’s lap, but at least Jisung’s chest is unoccupied. He can still breathe.
“And who do I have to thank for that?” Jisung licks half-heartedly at his chin, gives up. “How long are you staying?”
Minho purses his lips. The ocean breeze ruffles his hair; it’d been black when Jisung had last seen him, blue-toned and icy for the winter. Now it’s bronze. Jisung watches Minho stick his thumb in his mouth, cringes half a second too late when said thumb smudges over Jisung’s cheek like—like Yeji’s grandma would, or something. He’s pliant, though, lets Minho work him over. “Thursday afternoon, maybe.”
“Thurs—that’s not even three full days!” Jisung turns on the puppy-dog eyes, grabs at Minho’s thighs. “And I have work tomorrow!”
“Then I’ll come hang out with you at work.” Minho smiles, small and crooked. “Right after I guest-teach modern for the Hwang School summer intensive kiddos.”
“You’re not even here for three full days and my girlfriend is already employing you?” Jisung clutches at his chest. “Where has the justice gone?”
“It’ll be fun.” Minho sucks his popsicle stick clean, moves off Jisung to lay beside him. “Also time to dust off my bowling skills.”
“I’ll make sure to reserve lane five and put up the bumpers for you.”
“But I always have lane eleven.”
“There’s a nine-year-old’s birthday party tomorrow in lanes three and four and I want her and her little friends to watch you suck.”
“Hey now.” Minho sits up on his elbow. Jisung meets his eyes smilingly, only to get flicked on the forehead.
“Ow,” he whispers, which makes Minho smile, too. He squeezes Jisung by the chin, shuffles to lay his cheek on Jisung’s chest.
“Okay, you’ve definitely been working out,” mutters Minho, shifting into Jisung’s side and jabbing him in the ribcage with his protruding shoulder bone. “You have breasts now, Jisungie.”
“Thanks, man,” Jisung huffs. Minho’s head is heavy, too. “Not much to do around here other than make music and hang out with Yeji and deodorize bowling shoes. And pump iron.”
Minho hums, and it vibrates against Jisung’s chest. “You could mine bitcoin or something, like other nerds.”
“Still to this day I don’t know what the fuck that means.”
“Me neither.” Minho giggles, lays his hand atop Jisung’s tummy. He pinches at the skin there through Jisung’s top… and Jisung lets him. He’s like a kneading cat.
“Or, you could come visit more often.” Jisung peers down his body. The last dregs of the sun’s light have faded, but the beachside houses offer enough light pollution that he can make out the top of Minho’s head and stroke his fingers into his hair.
“Let me know how your ass feels after a two-hour bus ride.” Minho’s fingers drum on his stomach. “It’d probably be worse for you, actually, since you don’t have one.”
“Have what?”
“An ass.”
Jisung chokes out a laugh, pulling on Minho’s hair in revenge. “Why’re you so fucking obsessed with me today?”
“Poor Jisungie,” simpers Minho, rolling his front across half of Jisung’s body. “No cushioning.” He pinches at the side of Jisung’s butt, then answers him in a rumble into his chest, “Because I missed you.”
“Not enough to stay through the weekend.”
Minho lifts his head, glares Jisung down.
Minho’s glare is scary, especially when he gives the poker face his all without even a twitch of weakness in his lips. But Jisung’s faced enough in his life for all of them to average out to an intimidation level of negative three.
“I have work,” says Minho, lowering his head.
“You could take time off.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” Minho noses into his chest, and it tickles. Makes it a little hard for Jisung to breathe. “If you really missed me, you would take time off tomorrow.”
“No, if I really missed you, I would take the cut on my paycheck to reserve you a lane so you can get even worse at bowling.”
Minho sighs, “I can pay.”
Jisung pats him on the ass. “I wouldn’t let you.” The stars are bright tonight, though the sky looks navy-deep enough to swallow them all. “But you can pay for your own carcinogenic spicy nachos.”
“Yay,” says Minho weakly.
The water is rough now as it crashes onto the sand, but they’re near enough to the dunes to not need to worry. Jisung’s breaths are shallow, if only because his chest can only rise so far with Minho’s weight atop it. He’s warm, doesn’t give Jisung any reprieve from the humid night, but the wind does.
Jisung thinks Minho might be nearly asleep when he gives him a squeeze and mutters, “DQ?” because some nights call for second dessert.
They’re sat on the curb outside the Dairy Queen—all the tables occupied by happy families and shit—and Minho’s intently focused on scraping his spoon at the very outsides of his ice cream where it’s melty. He always does that—spoons the outsides all the way to the bottom, leaving behind a bizarre, corncob-like ice cream core until that too starts to melt.
Jisung supposes it’s better than his once-upon-a-time chocolate chip cookie dough habits, melting every spoonful of ice cream on his tongue until the cookie dough globs were isolated and spat back into the bowl to be consumed en masse as a finale.
He doesn’t do that anymore, he swears.
Jisung taps his spoon against his ice cream cup’s edge to the same beat set by his restless foot. “Uh, so, listen.”
Minho’s eyes dart over. The plastic spoon’s dangling from his mouth.
“You know how I have a SoundCloud.”
Minho snorts, looks back to his dessert. “What kind of question is that? I told all my school friends about J.ONE and his beats to not study to.”
Jisung looks at him flatly. Resumes. “Anyway, there’s this guy, whose, like, his stuff is really good. I’ve been following him for a while, but only kinda recently did he follow me back and actually messaged me—”
“Jisungie,” croons Minho, smiling catlike around the edge of his spoon. “I didn’t know you were talking to boys on the internet.”
Jisung stares again. Tries to smack Minho’s Blizzard out of his hands, but he’s too slow. “Let me finish,” he pleads, force-feeds Minho a spoonful of his own ice cream until he’s nearly gagging on M&Ms. “He’s a sound engineer at some label in the city and, like, I don’t know how we got to talking about it but he’d mentioned wanting to collab just on, like, some side projects, but then he just brought up that he wanted to refer me at his work. If I wanted.” Jisung blinks. “To work, in, uh. Manhattan.”
Minho watches him, unblinking, spoon-hand frozen in the air.
“Nothing’s official yet.” Jisung rubs at the back of his neck. “I submitted the application last week, and he told me they’d get back to me this week about an interview, so. Who knows.”
“So you’re following me,” says Minho, devoid of inflection, “to the city.”
Jisung’s lips make a sound as they pop apart, though he has nothing to offer before Minho’s scooting over on the curb until they’re hip to hip, taking Jisung by the back of the head to draw him in so their foreheads bump.
Minho’s eyes glimmer a bit, even this blurry this close, under the glow of the Dairy Queen sign. “About time,” he huffs, breath warm on Jisung’s face. Jisung feels himself split into a bashful grin.
When Minho lets him go to fish his spoon out of his ice cream cup, Jisung doesn’t look away. He’s chewing on the inside of his lip, the tips of his ears on fire. “Haven’t even heard back,” he murmurs.
“Why wouldn’t they take you?” says Minho around a mouthful. “You have a degree, an internal reference. A whole SoundCloud portfolio of beats to not study to.” His mouth quirks at its corner. “Years of valuable work experience at King Pin Lanes.”
Jisung snorts out a laugh into his cup.
“Plus you’re goddamn adorable.” Minho pinches his cheek, pulls at it farther than human skin should stretch.
“My secret weapon,” deadpans Jisung, cheek still trapped. He leaves his ice cream on the curb so he can grab Minho’s hand and sandwich it in his own. “You call it following. I call it rectifying the fact that you abandoned me for my last two years of high school and never came back.” It’s a joke, of course. Jisung would’ve tied Minho up, tossed him in the back of his mom’s sedan, and mowed down a host of mini-vans Jersey-sliding all the way to the city had Minho even considered staying behind, passing up a scholarship Jisung knew he’d so wanted.
“So you’re following me.” When Jisung chances a peek at Minho, he’s looking at their hands. Jisung does so, too, watches Minho slot their fingers together. Then Minho asks, “Have you told Yeji?”
Jisung’s lips press into a line. It’s sweaty between their palms but they’re sweaty everywhere, really. “Um, no. She acts like her expectations of me are super low to be funny but I know they aren’t. Didn’t wanna get her hopes up.”
“Her hopes to finally get rid of you?” Minho grins, and Jisung steps on his toe.
“I’ll tell her if I get the interview. And it goes well.”
“Mhm.”
Jisung slumps into Minho’s side. He’s silent a while. Then, “Can you go get back in line? I did leg day yesterday.”
Minho feels up his thigh suspiciously. “You sure about that?”
“Please go get me a chili cheese dog.” Jisung lifts his head. “O Minho, fire burning in the furnace of my heart.” He blinks, jaw hanging open as he racks his brain. “The most beautiful rose blooming in the garden of my heart. The bike with the one stolen wheel rusting away in the garage of my heart. The mummified banana in the Jisung’s freshman year locker of my heart—”
“Don’t speak of the banana.” Minho tears out of his grip, takes his ice cream with him to the line.
Jisung’s not sure what’s worse—his mom taking his plans to move to New York as a joke, then falling into ten minutes of speechless shock when he shows her the goddamn receipts, or Yeji being utterly unfazed at the news. Delighted, even.
Probably the latter.
His video call interview had gone well. Sure, his voice had cracked with nerves a few times and afterward, when he’d caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, there had been enormous pit stains on his button-down, but Chan’s supervisor Eden had been good-humored and so laidback Jisung felt dumb for even attempting business casual (on top, that is. The oscillating fan blowing into his boxers had been completely necessary).
Chan had let it slip through SoundCloud messages only the next day that Jisung would be hired—but don’t rat me out or we’ll both get fired before you even get here—and had proceeded to send Jisung his phone number and private social media.
Jisung’s VirtuoSeo Entertainment contract had come by email a few days later.
To Jisung, it feels… surreal. Like he’ll show up on his first day only for someone to pinch him, make him wake up behind the counter at the King Pin Lanes concession stand, frozen fried chicken bubbling away in the industrial deep-fryer and an obese rat scuttling over his toes.
To Yeji, though?
Jisung surveys her once again. They’re at the one decent sushi restaurant in town—though that might be too forgiving, as Jisung swears he got food poisoning here a few years back—and Yeji’s dissolving her wasabi without a care in the world.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she sighs, setting her chopsticks down and tucking her hands into her lap. She lifts her big, sparkly eyes, expectant, and bats them at Jisung. “What, Sung? Speak.”
Like a dog, Jisung does as he’s told. “You’re not—I don’t know.” He nibbles on his inner lip. “I guess I was expecting more of a reaction.”
“I don’t seem happy for you?” She pouts, forehead crinkling.
“You do, that’s just it, I…” He leans back in his chair and peers out the window, makes accidental eye contact with a woman pushing a stroller. He looks away quickly. “Thought you’d be upset. Maybe.” He shrugs. “A bit.”
Yeji is silent. Then she sighs again, sticks her little hand palm-up on the tablecloth, fingers flexing expectantly. Jisung’s in a weird enough mood that he almost doesn’t surrender, but then he does, laying his hand there until her cold fingers are constricting around his wrist.
“Jisung—”
“Yeji.”
Her eyes squint up a bit. It makes him half-smile. “Jisung. You know how I told you, like, way back when we were sixteen, seventeen, that when we graduated, I was gonna stay here, maybe take some business classes online, then work at my mom’s dance school, take it over from her when she got too old.”
Jisung manages a minuscule nod.
“And, like… what did I do?” She shrugs. “I did all of that. Well, I didn’t take it over yet. Mama Hwang’s still a force of nature. But I always knew I’d stay here. That I wanted to stay here, in town. Teach dance. Be close to my parents.”
Jisung focuses on keeping his breathing even. As long as he’s known her, Yeji’s never been much of a crier. He carries that weight for the both of them.
“But I always knew you wouldn’t stay forever, Jisung.”
Jisung slumps in his chair, enough that his knees knock Yeji’s. “In due time I could be the King Pin Lanes general manager,” he says in a small voice.
“And keep DJing for kids’ birthday parties under disco lights?”
Jisung’s lips purse. “Nah. Kids these days don’t understand the cultural impact of the That’s So Raven soundtrack.”
“Or Hayley Kiyoko in Lemonade Mouth.”
“Exactly.”
Yeji smiles, head cocked to the side, still squeezing at Jisung’s wrist. “But I always knew—”
“Please don’t say you knew I was gonna do great things someday or something. Great things my ass. If they don’t fire me my first week, I’ll be a junior audio engineer, probably live in some mildewy basement with my friends Larry and Minho the Second, the first two cockroaches I catch crawling out of my bathroom vent.”
Yeji looks at him funny. “I’m… gonna miss your active imagination, Sung.”
And Jisung looks at their hands, despondent. “I hope that’s not all.”
“It’s not, baby, it’s not.” She rubs her thumb warmly over the veins on the back of Jisung’s hand, even though he knows they give her the heebie-jeebies. “Fine. I won’t get all motivational-speaker on you, but, like.” She sticks out her bottom lip. “Permission to be mushy?”
Jisung meets her eyes, lips wobbling at a smile. “Permission granted.”
She beams, eyes mirthful crescents. “I think you’re special and so talented, Jisung, I’ve thought that since—maybe not day one, but at least day ten—and—no, stop, I know what you’re gonna say, you’ll say I am, too, and… yeah, I’m pretty cool, but I can stay here and for now, feel fulfilled teaching kids what I know. But you?” She snorts, nods out the window, as if the water ski rental shop across the street is a microcosm of their little coastal town. And it kind of is. “It’s different. I knew someone cool would come snatch you up someday. And it just happened to be this Chris Bang guy.” Her eyes are soft as she regards Jisung. “I have yet to decide if he seems like a good egg, but his music is alright.”
Jisung sits up. He slips his fingertips under the string bracelet on Yeji’s wrist. “It’s more than alright.”
“Uh-huh, fanboy. Anyway, I googled this VirtuoSeo company of yours. Pretty sure one of their artists was on my Discover Weekly last week.” Yeji tips her chin up. “Preeetty cool, Jisungie.”
Jisung suppresses a smile. “Your sushi’s getting cold.”
“Very funny.” She does pick up her chopsticks, though, and go for the salmon sashimi.
They eat for a bit in silence, hands still linked on the table. Then Jisung, with a roll in each cheek, says, “Let me know if I’m reading the room wrong, or—the sushi restaurant wrong, but.” He swallows his food down, clears his throat. “This feels, like… like the end.”
Yeji chuckles, quiet. “Ever the dramatic.” Then she looks him in the eye. “An end, baby boy.” She tweaks him on the cheek. Jisung feels a phantom tingle there, where Minho had pinched him last week that night outside the Dairy Queen. “If you don’t pay me and your lovely mother at least an annual visit I’m gonna hunt you down.”
Jisung tries for a smile, but the weight on his shoulders is heavy and melancholy. “Ooh, I’m so scared.” They’ve had a good run, he thinks. A long one. And after they have goodbye sex tonight or whatever, he’ll probably look at their junior prom pictures and have a long fucking cry. Drink a bit. Look at their senior prom pictures, at pictures of Yeji in her cheer outfit at the top of the stunt pyramid. Cry more. Write a dumb song.
Yeji rolls her eyes, tucks back into her food. “Our little Hanniebun in the big city,” she muses then, sighing wistfully. “Minho better take good care of you.”
The smile comes with less effort this time. “You know he will.”
“Han, you absolute fucknut.”
They’re stood outside a beige-painted brick building in Kips Bay—they being Minho and Jisung. Parked at the curb nearby is a pickup truck with a mattress clumsily tied down to its cargo bed, because apparently Minho knows people who can loan them pickup trucks to drive in to IKEA and back.
Jisung’s scared to look Minho in the eye. For real, this time.
In his periphery, Minho is pinching the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut. “Craigslist?” Minho mutters. “Really?”
Jisung squeaks out an mhm.
He’d just gotten off the phone with the true landlord of the apartment he’d… not actually rented. The fake landlord has his number blocked now, too, going by the straight-to-voicemail funnel whenever he tries to call.
Minho exhales through pursed lips. Then he shoves Jisung toward the street.
“Hey!” Jisung squawks, stumbling back with a hand on the hood of someone’s Toyota. “I could’ve died!” The street is quiet, devoid of traffic and, anyhow, there’s half a car width between him and the road, but. But still.
“Jisung,” Minho whines emphatically, dropping to a defeated squat and promptly popping back up again. He strides toward Jisung, drags him off the Toyota’s hood where he’d wilted melodramatically. “How much are you down?”
“What?” Jisung brushes his shorts off, still ardently avoiding Minho’s eyes.
“How much did the bastard steal from you?”
Jisung looks at the toes of Minho’s clean white sneakers, then his own beat-up boots not quite meant for a hot September day. “Three K.”
Minho nods. “Okay. Could’ve been worse.”
“Could’ve been worse?” Now Jisung looks up, frenzied. “That was supposed to be first and last months’ rent and security! Now what the hell do I do?”
Bad idea, bad idea. He can see the fury flooding into Minho’s eyes. “You fell for—for a thousand dollar rent? For a studio in Manhattan? You fucking…” Minho’s hands stop flexing, like he’s overcome the urge to strangle Jisung. “Yes, I see now that you’re extremely lucky, Jisung. It’s a miracle this guy didn’t wring more out of you. As for what you do now…” He shakes his head, unlocks the truck, circles around it to get in the driver’s seat.
Meekly, Jisung climbs in on the passenger side.
Minho holds onto his seat as he peers back, inches the truck out of the parking spot. It’s a weird comfort, having Minho’s hand so close, even when Jisung’s simultaneously so frightened by him.
“What… do I do now?” he asks, quiet. He has some money saved, but not much. King Pin Lanes isn’t a top-rated employer, or anything, nor was online school free.
Minho says nothing until he has to stop at a red light. Then he reaches out to cup the back of Jisung’s neck warmly and squeeze, though his eyes remain on the road. “You should’ve asked me for help, Jisungie.”
“I wanted to handle it all myself.” Jisung flops his head back against the headrest. “Even my mom thought—”
“Jisung,” Minho interrupts, “I love your mother, but she’s only ever lived back home since she immigrated. I don’t know if she’s the most reliable second opinion when it comes to this.”
Jisung knows he’s right. And his mom’s usually only his fourth opinion when it comes to anything—Minho being second and Yeji third—but he’d… well. Been misguided in wanting to act mostly-independent at twenty-three, apparently.
It’s another five minutes before he realizes Minho’s clearly driving with a destination in mind. He sits up, peers out the window at the busy streets. “Where are we going?”
At the next red, Minho clutches the steering wheel with both hands, lays his cheek to them as he gazes at Jisung. His eyes are tired but his smile is mischievous. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m gonna fit that mattress.”
The moment Jisung sets foot in Minho’s apartment, there’s a most unusual dog already trying to sniff his ass.
“That’s Gretchen,” says Minho, voice strained as he hauls Jisung’s suitcase through the doorway.
“You have a dog?” Jisung practically shouts, tentatively offering the dog his hand to sniff. It—Gretchen—is white and fuzzy. Looks a bit like a very petite dinosaur.
“I tolerate the dog,” Minho corrects.
Then there’s a whistle, a few claps. “Gretchen, leave them alone.” Gretchen scampers off dutifully to sit at the feet of the man eating cereal at the kitchen counter.
Minho shuts the door behind them. When he sighs, it sounds like it comes from deep within his soul.
“Hi,” Jisung greets the cereal guy, who, with his mouth full, gives them a lazy wave. Turning to Minho, he hisses, “You didn’t tell me you still had a roommate!”
“That’s Seungmin, keeper of Gretchen.” Minho flashes Jisung a crooked smile. “He contributes two-thirds of our rent since he has the big room and I let him keep the dog.” Then he squeezes Jisung’s shoulder. “Stay right here, I need to tidy up a bit.” Minho promptly disappears behind the closest door, shuts and locks it behind him.
Jisung is left to idle in the foyer, guitar case in hand. Seungmin’s on his phone, still crunching on cereal, but it’s out of instinct that Jisung toes out of his shoes, leaves his guitar hopefully where Gretchen won’t pee on it, and wanders over to bother him.
“I hear Minho’s told you absolutely nothing about me,” says Seungmin, eyes on his phone. It’s flat on the counter, where he’s doing a mini crossword, and there’s a wry quirk to his mouth, so Jisung lets himself laugh.
“Definitely didn’t know he lived with a dog.” Jisung scratches the back of his neck. “And unless you’re that roommate he met on Grindr way back when, then—” He considers the way Seungmin’s eyes flash to him expressionlessly. “Wait, that’s you?”
“Well, neither of us went looking for roommates on Grindr, that’s for sure. But yes, in the flesh.” Seungmin stands, picks up his bowl to take to the sink. Minho typically spares Jisung most of the gory details of his hookups, will forward him the occasional funny-slash-unwarranted dick pic he receives, but now all that’s racing through Jisung’s mind is is Minho still fucking this guy? Am I gonna hear Minho fucking this guy? Are they gonna, like, make out in front of me—
“Coffee?” asks Seungmin.
Jisung blinks. “Please.”
Seungmin and Jisung are on the small living area sofa, coffee mugs in hand like civil adults, when Minho emerges from his bedroom. His shirt clings to his chest with a light coat of sweat but otherwise he’s all smiles at the sight of them socializing—or attempting to. Seungmin goes to law school, apparently, though from Jisung’s initial assessments, he seems rather emotionally stable.
“We can put your mattress on top of mine, Jisungie,” Minho decides, pulling up an ottoman opposite them. “There’s barely enough floorspace to stand as it is. So you can sleep out here—it’s not convertible, but, like, it’s doable,” he nods at the couch, “or, y’know. We can share. Queen’s big enough for the both of us.”
Seungmin regards Minho skeptically. Ah, yes, the topic Jisung purposefully hadn’t broached in his short time with Seungmin—mostly because he’s hardly even discussed it with Minho. “Are you moving in?” asks Seungmin, turning to Jisung with raised eyebrows.
Jisung flushes. Though he’s not a particularly intimidating guy, especially in his blue flannel dressing gown with Gretchen hanging over his lap, her beady black eyes satisfied as Seungmin faithfully scratches behind her ear, there’s something judgmental that lurks behind Seungmin’s gaze. Maybe he just knows small-town folk when he sees them.
“Jisung had some issues communicating with his landlord,” says Minho. Seungmin’s lips twitch knowingly, but he says nothing. “He eats a lot but I’ll buy his groceries, don’t worry.”
“Hey, I may have… participated in rendering myself homeless, but I’m not jobless!” Jisung sits up. “I’ll make this up to you.” Warily, he glances at Seungmin. “Both of you.”
Seungmin salutes him with his coffee mug.
Minho looks too amused for his own good, so Jisung clears his scratchy throat and blurts the first thing that comes to mind. “How’d—how’d you come up with the name Gretchen?”
“Oh, now there’s a wonderful story,” says Seungmin, preening, precisely at the same time as Minho groans and throws his head back. Seungmin continues to stare mildly at Jisung, as if he’s looking at an intriguing reptile behind glass at the zoo. “We’ve lived in this building now—what, three years?” Minho nods wearily to confirm. “A couple years back, mine and Minho’s neighbor was this sweet old lady across the hall who’d always bake things for us and give us leftovers when her picky grandkids wouldn’t eat all the food she made with love. And I always liked her dog, so she told me I should take it when she died. I thought it was a joke, but then when she died a year later, her daughter came knocking and told me she left the dog to me. Like, actually. In writing. So I spent a week nagging Minho and then I took her in.”
“It should be noted,” interrupts Minho, “that the dog’s name was Panini before she changed hands. Seungmin named her Gretchen.”
Jisung pouts. He quite likes the name Panini. “Why—”
Seungmin shrugs. “It was her owner’s name. It just felt right.”
Jisung narrows his eyes. “You renamed the dog after a dead old lady?”
Seungmin nods.
“Why the hell would you do that?”
Seungmin sips on his coffee. “Like I said, it felt right.”
Jisung tries to seek backup from Minho, but he’s on his phone, a tense little line between his brows. So Jisung settles on, “Well, I just hope your dog’s not cursed.” He makes eye contact with Gretchen—or, he thinks he does. There’s so much white fluff solely between her eyes he’s not sure she can see.
Then Seungmin smiles, patting her little head. “Guess you’ll find out.”
Minho’s room isn’t messy, it’s just… small. It doesn’t help that there’s a stack of opaque, plastic pins against the wall that seem to be functioning as a second closet. Nor does the fact that there’s a pole in the middle of it.
Jisung only notices the pole once they’ve finished sliding his own mattress into the room, letting it flop on top of Minho’s stripped one. Minho’s spreading the fitted sheet over Jisung’s mattress when the latter laughs, clipped and sudden. “Is that—?”
“It’s a dance pole.”
Jisung feels flummoxed. “Is it—?”
“It was here when we moved in.”
They leave it at that.
“So are you still, like.” Jisung’s on the edge of the bed in just his boxers, whilst Minho’s in the attached bathroom, door open, doing his skincare. Seungmin had returned a few hours ago from the library with pizza that they’d eaten at the counter, Minho standing as they only had two barstools—he shoved an anchovy dangerously deep into Jisung’s nostril when he’d initially refused to take the seat—and it’d been… nice. Comfortable. Jisung’s almost worried he’ll settle too easily into being a freeloader, but it could just be he’s missed Minho, being around him. He always does.
“Am I what?” Minho dapples eye cream on with the tip of his finger, peering out at Jisung.
“Oh.” Jisung leans back on his hands on the mattress, coughs to clear his throat. “Uh… fucking Seungmin?”
Minho nearly drops the pot of product. “He already told you about Grindr?” he yelps, and Jisung can only laugh.
“You did.” He spreads his bare toes, examines the way they look against Minho’s floor—herringbone wood, Seungmin had called it, when they’d been left to their own devices over coffee and Jisung had, naturally, complimented him on his floor. “Ages ago. I just connected the dots.”
Minho scoffs, smiles slightly as he turns back to the mirror. “Can’t believe you remember that.”
“I remember everything you tell me,” mumbles Jisung, pouting. Then, “So—?”
“No, I’m not.” Minho turns the faucet on, and Jisung gets a peek of his teeth as he smiles. “I’m not fucking Seungmin. We stopped that way before we became roommates.”
Jisung lifts a brow. And without looking, Minho adds, “There have been sporadic regressions, but.” He smirks at Jisung, shuts off the bathroom light. “The answer to your question is no.”
Minho flops onto the mattress beside him, ankles dangling off. The AC unit’s on full blast but Jisung can already feel the sweat gathering on his elbows and the backs of his knees. He glances back at Minho, only to shout and spring to his feet at a menacing silhouette looming in the window beyond him.
“What?” Minho rolls onto his stomach, follows his line of sight. “Oh, give it a rest, Jisungie. We just have guests.”
Jisung, clinging to the so-called dance pole, eases off. “Guests?” he croaks.
“Guests!” Minho gets to his feet, drags a value-size box of… of fucking Fancy Feast from under the bed.
Jisung’s eyes come into focus on the window, and then he’s smiling against his will. “Please don’t tell me—”
“Tell you what?” Minho cracks open two cans, slides the window open just enough to fit his hand through, set the cans on the lip of his window, slam it shut. He looks on, satisfied, with his hands on his hips as the three cats on the fire escape dive in to chow down on their meal.
Jisung huffs a laugh, knee-walks onto the mattress over to Minho, smacks him on the ass. Minho giggles, shoves Jisung away by the head.
“They’re my forbidden babies,” he sighs forlornly, sinking to his knees before the window. “Poor Dori had scabies a few months ago. Nothing a few anti-mange shampoo baths in one of mommy’s bins couldn’t solve.”
Jisung squints at him. “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Minho smiles wryly. “Probably for the best.”
Minho gives Jisung the who’s who of his fire escape cats—Soonie, Doongie, and Dori, the scabies one, though Minho slaps Jisung for calling her that. Explains that he’s wary to handle them too often lest he bring fleas in and pass them on to Seungmin’s dog—granted, he never pets Gretchen.
Minho’s on his side in bed, eyes slipping shut, his toes still resting against Jisung’s ankle where he’d kicked him accidentally-on-purpose trying to get comfy, when Jisung mumbles, “Thank you.”
Minho’s eyes stay shut. He smiles. “If it’d been me who’d been an idiot—which, you know, it wouldn’t have been, but the point still stands—I’d be in your bed right now.”
“That’s… a strange way to put it.”
“You get the point.” Still with his eyes closed, Minho reaches out, gropes at Jisung’s bare torso until he finds his hand and drags it to the middle of the mattress, squeezing tight. “When’s your first day?”
“At work?” Minho nods. “Monday.”
“Mm.” Minho pats his hand. “You’ll feel better once you go in.”
Jisung hadn’t mentioned feeling bad, but Minho knows. He shifts his cheek on the scratchy throw pillow he’d grabbed from the living room couch, eyes roaming Minho’s face. He’s got blackout curtains but they’re drawn, letting in the golden streetlamp glow that floods over the planes of his face. “How’ve auditions been?” When Minho had graduated from the conservatory three-ish years back, he’d always been on the run between this and that audition—local company projects, photoshoots for dance wear companies, sometimes background roles in movies and TV. No matter when Jisung had texted, he’d never been home.
Minho groans as he stretches his legs, toes brushing down Jisung’s ankles and feet until they’re gone. “I stopped,” he mumbles. “Auditioning.”
Jisung blinks.
“Got tired.” Minho peels his eyes open, features settling into a frown. “The money was always shit. If I ever had any real plans, they’d last a season, maybe two at most, if I was lucky. And then I’d have to do it all over again. Find stuff to fill in the gaps for some pathetic attempt at a rainy day fund. All while staying in peak fucking shape.” He scoffs, shakes his head. “So I stopped.”
“Oh.” Jisung can tell Minho’s tired, doesn’t swoop in with the but you love dancing! he’s so tempted to.
“I work nights now,” offers Minho. “At… a diner.”
Jisung lifts an eyebrow. He wants to ask when. Why Minho never told him.
Minho’s dark eyes flash to him, then to the ring on Jisung’s finger that he’s fiddling with. “The tips are better than you’d think.”
Jisung chuckles. “Okay.” He turns his hand, catches Minho’s fingers in his own. “Any chance you were supposed to work tonight?”
Minho licks his lips. Smiles. “I was,” he admits, “but I got someone to cover. Had, hm… a very stressful day today, as you might’ve heard.”
Jisung groans, and it trails off into a laugh. “How does it feel, Minho? The seed of your stress sleeping in your very bed?”
“Please don’t refer to yourself as seed.”
“What, are you suddenly not gay?”
Minho cackles, clamps a hand over his mouth. “You’ll make me wake up Seungmin.”
“You scared of him? The guy with the house slippers?”
Minho scoffs. “God, no. But I need him to remember me somewhat fondly in case I ever get into deep shit and need a lawyer.” He slots their fingers together where they’d been playing at being tangled. “Good thing I gave him really awesome head the last time we hooked up.”
Jisung twitches every movable part of his face in an elaborate cringe.
“Pretty Jisungie,” simpers Minho, giggling, and Jisung promptly face-plants into the throw pillow. Then Minho swats away his hand. “It’s too hot to hold hands.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“You’re breaking my balls.”
When Jisung only smirks, Minho squints, rolls over, and proceeds to worm closer to Jisung until he’s practically falling off the mattress. Then Minho settles. “Good night,” he says lightly.
Jisung hooks his arm around Minho, if only to keep from toppling off. But it works as revenge.
That lasts about thirty seconds. Minho grumbles, “I take it back, you’re too hot,” and squirms out of Jisung’s arms.
“I get that a lot.”
“You literally don’t.”
chris
hey man!
what time did they tell you to show up for orientation?
jisung
9 i think?
chris
ok come at 8:30
It’s 8:24am. Jisung’s an obstruction in a flowing river of pedestrians on the sidewalk outside the VirtuoSeo building. He’d arrived five minutes ago, has yet to work up the courage to simply… walk inside. Through the glass entryway, the lobby is lofty and high-ceilinged, dangling with massive, glamorous art deco chandeliers.
He takes his last breath—for forever, maybe, depending on how this goes—and strides in through the revolving door. The air conditioning washes over him, and he’s frozen on the tiled floor as secretaries behind a marble countertop answer phones, as badged employees brush past him toward the turnstiles guarding the elevators, when strong fingers wrap around his bicep and tug him forth.
He’s walking, then, and his eyes follow his guiding arm up to its owner. Chris Bang. He grins at Jisung. “No time to waste.”
“W-what?”
Chris stops at a little station with a screen, where he flashes his badge and prints Jisung a guest pass that he sticks on his shirt. “Let’s go.”
Chris herds him into an elevator with a bunch of other folks done up in business professional. Jisung is underdressed compared to them, but overdressed compared to Chris, who’s in a hoodie and jeans with headphones around his neck.
Once the suits empty out of the elevator, leaving the two of them alone and headed for the floor of the only remaining lit button—the twenty-fifth—Jisung looks at Chris and utters, “You seemed taller online.”
Chris gives him an unusual smile. “Likewise.”
Out of the elevator, Chris again takes Jisung by the arm, guides him to a room he has to badge into. It’s a control room, Jisung realizes, when Chris gently nudges him in. They’re not alone, either; there’s a dude on a couch, one eye open on the phone held above his face, the other verging on she’s meditating guys she’s died.
“Got him!” announces Chris, who slaps Jisung on the shoulder and flops into one of the rolling chairs by the mixing console. He drags another close, gestures for Jisung to take it.
Couch Guy sits up, groaning, and swipes an iced coffee off a table that looks to be more water than coffee by now.
“He’s not a morning person,” says Chris, settling his elbows on his knees. He smiles all chipper at Jisung who, though settled in the chair, must still look bushwhacked enough to prompt him to refocus. “Ah—right. Don’t worry, we’ll get you downstairs before they come for you. I just wanted to… like.” Chris grins and spreads his arms. “Welcome! I succeeded in my evil mission to drag you here.”
Part of Jisung is still starstruck, too, to be here, in Manhattan, at the VirtuoSeo headquarters, of Chris Bang’s own accord, so he can only offer an awkward laugh before the couch guy cuts in, “Didn’t he come from South Jersey? Bet he didn’t need too much convincing.” Couch Guy glances at Jisung. “No offense.”
Jisung’s brows rise. “None… taken?”
“Anyway,” Chris directs, clapping his hands together, “I just wanted us to, like, get together before you got swept up in, uh. Actual work.” He chuckles. “One of the junior audio engineers actually quit a few weeks ago, so I suspect once you’re all trained up, they’ll stick you on her old project. But—after hours, this is where you’ll find me.”
Couch Guy clears his throat.
“And Changbin,” grants Chris.
Jisung grips the arms of the chair. “Find you…”
“To work on our own shit! Duh.” Chris gives him a dopey smile. “Don’t worry. This room’s historically never booked after six, and Changbin and I’ve been in here almost every night for… close to a year?” He frowns in Changbin’s direction, gets a nod in return. “Yeah. No one’s gonna bust us. Even if they wanted to, we’d have nepotism on our side.”
Changbin slurps again from his watery coffee. “Always glad to be of service.”
Chris rolls his eyes smilingly, turns back to Jisung. “So—”
“Wait.” Jisung had done some googling of his own. “Changbin, as in—VirtuoSeo Changbin Seo?”
Changbin only looks at him blankly. Then, “South Jersey,” he sighs, shakes his head.
“Wait,” Jisung repeats, connecting a few stray dots as the growl of Changbin’s voice sinks to his core, “you’re fucking SpearB! From Chris’ tracks!”
Again, blank looks from Changbin.
But Jisung is all smiles. “Holy shit, dude! Does your dad care—?”
Then Changbin laughs, scratchy and harsh. “You think my dad listens to Chris’ music?”
Chris pouts, slumped against the mixing console. “I mean—someday—it’s not… implausible.”
Jisung scoots his chair close to Changbin, offers up his hand. “I love your style, man, seriously.”
Changbin takes his hand, at least looks vaguely amused.
“Okay, Jisung, we should probably get you back down to the lobby,” says Chris, when Changbin shouts, “Hey!” still holding fast to Jisung’s hand. “We were having a moment.”
“You can have another moment once we’ve made sure Jisung isn’t prematurely fired.” Chris whisks him away bodily. “Just take the elevator back down to the lobby, man, it’s the button with the star and the L! And remember: twenty-fifth floor, studio three!”
It’s nearly nine when Jisung slips into Minho and Seungmin’s. Minho’d had a key made for him the day before, which seemed drastic to Jisung, but Minho had also claimed it necessary, that their schedules wouldn’t overlap and it’d be the least intrusive to Seungmin’s routine.
Stumbling over his own shoes in the pitch-dark foyer, not yet familiar enough with the space to be able to slap on the lights, Jisung sees that Minho was just being prudent.
There’s a faraway beam of light emanating from beneath Seungmin’s bedroom door, but otherwise, the apartment is dark and silent. Jisung had reported to level twenty-five, studio three after work, and the hours had slipped away when Chris broke out the soju and Changbin ordered takeout for ten.
He’d missed Minho—by how many hours, he can’t even be sure. But he changes, brushes his teeth, slumps onto the bed. One of the fire escape cats is curled up on the sill outside the window, and Minho’s side of the mattress is empty. All Jisung wants is to ask about his day. Tell him about his own.
Jisung doesn’t remember falling asleep. But out the windows, the sky is dark gray with the beginnings of dawn as the mattress jostles beneath him. He suspects he’s got an hour, maybe two at most, until his first alarm blares. He cracks an eye open to see Minho crawling to the windows, pulling the curtains into place, sighing and slumping down beside Jisung. His hair is a bit damp and he smells clean, like coconuts and vanilla, and blearily, Jisung thinks he wants to wrap himself up in it.
“Hey,” he breathes, voice rough.
Minho shifts to his side, hands tucked under his pillow, and smiles faint but doesn’t open his eyes. “How was your first day?”
“Good,” whispers Jisung. “Yeah, it went… well, I think.”
“Tell me about it tomorrow.”
Jisung nods. “Okay.” His eyes roam Minho’s sleepy face, the wet spots on the shoulders of his t-shirt. The briefs that must be years old because they’re stretched out, gaping around his muscled thighs. “How was—how was work?”
He gets no response. Minho’s lips are slack, chest rising and falling in slow, even waves.
Jisung watches him, fingers drumming the mattress. He’s still awake when his phone chimes with the alarm, and he lunges to turn it off.
Minho doesn’t even flinch.
It’s a quarter to nine on Friday and Minho’s nearly out the door.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you all week,” Jisung whines, hanging off the coatrack like a complete waste of space.
“I’ll be home all day tomorrow.” Minho’s hefting his heavy duffel over his shoulder, slipping into his sneakers. Jisung’s not sure if his diner uniform is extremely elaborate or if he’s planning on never seeing Jisung again going by the size of the bag.
“Until you won’t,” protests Jisung. “At night. Which is way more important than the day.”
“Duty calls, Jisungie.” Minho turns toward him, hard eyes a force to be reckoned with on this matter. “Weekend nights are the busiest.”
“But I miss you.”
Minho’s lips purse. And his eyes soften, too. But then he’s patting his pockets for his phone, his keys, gearing up to leave Jisung pathetically alone on his first real Friday night in New York. “You can hang out with Seungminnie,” Minho says inattentively.
“You can hang out with Gretchen,” Seungmin corrects, striding from his room in head-to-toe black and fastening his fucking cufflinks as he comes to stand by Jisung expectantly. “Coat,” states Seungmin when Jisung doesn’t immediately understand, so Jisung, feeling enraged and embittered and abandoned, sizes him up, guesses which coat off the rack Seungmin was going for, and lifts it by the shoulders so he can slip inside.
“I hope you know it’s seventy-five degrees out there,” mutters Jisung.
Seungmin snorts, turning before Jisung and shrugging into the coat nonetheless.
“You look dapper,” appraises Minho, though he’s looking at his phone. “Date? Datedatedate?”
“Dinner with a professor.” When Minho’s eyes lift, sparkling, Seungmin rolls his. “And five other students.”
“Shame,” says Minho. Then he kisses the pads of his fingers, smushes them into Jisung’s cheek. “Good night, Jisungie!”
Seungmin follows him out the door, seals it shut behind them.
There’s a soft jingle as Gretchen emerges from Seungmin’s room, dog tags chinking. She hops onto the couch and curls herself into a little doggie doughnut as if leaving room for Jisung’s lonely ass on the other end.
Ruefully, he stares at the spot on the couch. But he doesn’t think he knows Chris or Changbin well enough yet to try and leech off their weekend plans. So he takes the spot beside Gretchen and turns the TV on, only to find out it’s been logged out of Seungmin’s Netflix account.
“Fuck,” Jisung says to the ceiling. The longer he sits there, the more he feels like he’s standing outside his own body, watching himself sit there.
He grabs his guitar from Minho’s room.
There are too many parks with the word square in them. And they’re all on the same vertical, as if daring Jisung to mix them up. The most fucked up part is none of them are truly square.
Anyhow, he and Minho are at the park—one of the squares. They’re on a bench, ice creams in hand, and Jisung’s licking his definitely-subway-dirty, only-probably-immune-system-bolstering fingers as the ice cream melts all over them out of the cone. He’s hyperaware of Minho’s arm extended along the bench’s backrest, fingertips prodding Jisung’s shoulder blade every now and again; aware of the way, out of the corner of his eye, Minho bites aggressively at his ice cream instead of licking it, like toothache is a non-problem.
There they are again—Minho’s fingers. Jisung twitches as he feels them trace the angle of his shoulder blade. “You talk to Yeji lately?” asks Minho, just before he sticks the last of his cone in his mouth, crunching on it.
Jisung’s lips twist, half-smile, half-grimace. “Yeah. Last night, actually.” When I had nothing else to do but call my ex.
“Good.” Minho’s fingers tap out a beat through Jisung’s sweat-sticky shirt. “She’s been texting me more than she ever used to. Making sure I’m keeping an eye on her wittle Hanniebun.” Minho’s lips quirk up lopsidedly.
Jisung kicks his ankle. “Please tell me you didn’t tell her about the apartment fiasco.” He nibbles on the edge of his cone.
Minho laughs. “That’s your fuck-up to share.”
“So she still thinks I live alone?”
Minho gives him a quizzical smile. “Thought you were the one who talked to her,” he mutters. “All I’ve said is you’re as alive and cute and squishy as ever.” Then Minho abruptly licks his thumb, smears it over the corner of Jisung’s mouth.
“Dude!” Jisung chokes, cupping his cheek protectively. A passing little girl, walking hand-in-hand with her mother, stares. “We’re in public!”
Minho pops his thumb into his mouth, eyes bored. “You had ice cream on your face.”
“Did I, though?” Jisung squints.
Minho only winks.
Jisung scoffs, tugs the front of his t-shirt up to wipe at his face. “Anyway,” he continues, and has to wonder if it’s an evasive tactic when he stuffs the rest of his ice cream into his cheeks, “didn’t talk to ‘er for ‘at long.”
“I didn’t catch that,” says Minho, smirking. His fingers dance over Jisung’s shoulder.
Jisung waits until he’s swallowed to speak. The sun is warm where it dapples over their skin between the leaves, but the shade is cool enough to prick goosebumps on his skin. He drags his sticky hands over his jeans. “I didn’t talk to her for that long.”
Minho hums. “She busy?” It’s absent-minded—reminds Jisung that he hasn’t told Minho the full story. He’s almost tempted to keep it to himself. All these years later, it should and does feel wrong that Minho still knows everything there is to know about Jisung, but Jisung feels he knows less and less about Minho. And it’s because Minho can keep his trap shut.
Jisung can’t.
“No, I mean.” Jisung sighs, clipped. “Sure, maybe. Maybe she’s busy. I wouldn’t know.”
Minho looks toward him, lifts a brow. Jisung’s made himself more interesting than people-watching, apparently. “What do you mean?”
“She just called to check in. Make sure I made it here safe.” He scratches at the flush he can feel rising to his cheek. “We talked for, like. Five minutes.” Then he drops his elbows to his knees, his forehead to the heels of his hands. Safe from the spine-tingling graze of Minho’s fingers. “It was… kind of awkward, actually. For the first time in our lives.”
“Awkward how?” Minho touches him anyway, smooths a hand over his shoulder. And though he runs from it, Jisung craves it, too, so he shifts into it, angles his knees toward Minho those few degrees.
He pulls his lower lip into his mouth, lets it slip back out. “We broke up, um.” Jisung rubs at his jaw. “Before I came here.”
Minho says nothing.
“It was, like. Amicable, obviously. But.” Jisung shrugs, feels the grip of Minho’s hand tighten. “Feels weird. Like… there’s a hole.”
“In your heart?”
Jisung looks up to find Minho’s sitting toward him as well, lips twitching with suppressed amusement. He smacks Minho on the thigh, makes to recoil. “Shut up.”
“I’m sorry.” Minho gathers Jisung into his arms before he can escape too far, and this, getting dragged so close to Minho he’s practically in his lap, locked in the circle of his arms with a hand sprawled over half his face… this should be far worse than a smidge of babying on a park bench on a buzzing Saturday afternoon.
But Jisung just hooks his fingers into the fabric of Minho’s shirt, tucks his nose in the hollow of his collarbone. He’s warm, maybe too warm given the weather, and so solid. Unforgiving. “Feels like there’s a hole, like. Like I don’t know how to exist if I’m just me.”
He and Minho met when Jisung was thirteen, Minho fifteen. Jisung couldn’t dance to save his life, but he hung around the Hwang School for the pretty girl with the nose freckle in his homeroom class where they’d sat in alphabetical order by last name. More often than not, he’d leave homeroom with his spine aching from sitting facing the desk behind him. Then Minho moved to town, took ballet and jazz and modern with Yeji, all taught by Yeji’s mother. Very quickly filled the shoes of every male lead in the School’s humble productions at the community theater.
Jisung asked Yeji out. Yeji introduced Jisung to Minho. And Jisung never quite let go of either of them.
He only realizes Minho’s speaking when he feels the rumble of it under his cheek. “Feels like I’ve never known a Jisung without a Yeji, y’know?” Minho pets Jisung’s hair, smooths it down the back of his neck. “But… it’s been a week now that you’ve been here. Just you.” He noses down so his lips press to the top of Jisung’s hair, soft and warm. “And I regret to inform you that you’re exactly the same.”
Jisung puffs out a weak laugh.
Jisung has the pin dropped on his maps app. He zooms in, zooms out, squints at the cross streets. He’s spent a couple weeks in New York now. Maybe he could get there just by eyeballing the street signs, instead of with his nose glued to his phone screen.
Minho had only mentioned it in passing, the diner where he works, but only because Jisung had brought it up—or, rather, pulled teeth to get it out of him. The Snack Bar. Then Minho had promptly derailed the conversation, distracted by their arrival at their destination cat café.
Minho’s at work, like most Saturday nights. And Jisung is bored, like most Saturday nights. He’d stuck around late at the studio with Chris and Changbin the night prior, and that’d gotten him over the slump of Friday night.
But with a new weekend night comes… the itchy, all-encompassing feeling of desolation.
Jisung lays on the couch with his legs slung over the arm. Gretchen has wormed her way between his side and the cushions, so she’s keeping him warm, even if her butt’s by his face.
Seungmin sits behind the kitchen counter, post-change-of-scenery from his bedroom for his next three hundred pages of reading. And he claims his headphones are noise-canceling, but when Jisung muses aloud, “Maybe I could go say hi to Minho at work,” he pulls them down to his neck and turns hawk eyes on Jisung.
It startles Jisung, a bit. “What?” he mutters, defensive, but then Seungmin just sighs down at his book.
“Maybe not the best idea.” He licks his fingertip to turn the page like an elderly librarian.
“Why?” Jisung frowns at his phone. “Google says they’re not that busy. Bet the drunk crowds don’t come in ’til, like, midnight.”
Seungmin lifts a brow. Jisung’s not sure if it’s a signal to him or a reaction to something anomalously intriguing in his massive lawyering tome.
“You think it’d stress him out?” asks Jisung. “I wouldn’t be annoying. I just want, like, a milkshake or something.” And to see him.
Seungmin doesn’t look his way. Puts his headphones back on.
Jisung’s eyes narrow. Okay.
Gretchen’s head pops up when he rolls off the couch, grabs his house key, shuffles into his shoes. Seungmin’s doesn’t.
The Snack Bar is pretty damn dead when Jisung rolls up. There’s a couple eating by the window, and the bell on the door reverberates too loudly through the otherwise-empty restaurant as Jisung ducks inside.
There’s a guy at the front—the host, presumably—phone held to his ear, curls spilling out of his uniform hat. It’s cute, the hat, trimmed with stripes of mustard yellow and ketchup red. Jisung can’t quite imagine Minho consenting to wear one, though.
Jisung waits for the host to finish his phone call, but the latter doesn’t say a word, just gazes vacantly at the wall opposite for a good minute until he hangs up and turns big brown boba-ball eyes on Jisung. “The kids upstairs like to prank call us,” he explains, clearing his throat as he grips both sides of the stand he’s behind. “I feel bad hanging up, so, like, I just let them try to sell me a chicken, or whatever it was this time. Anyway—dude, sorry. Table for one?”
Jisung blinks. He’d almost forgotten he was alone. “Uh—what? Yeah, I mean—” He squints at the host’s name tag. Sunwoo. “Is Minho here?”
“Who?” Another vacant stare.
“Minho, Minho Lee, he… works here. At least I think.” Jisung leans over the stand, checks the banner on the first menu he spots. Yep. Right place.
“Oh,” says Sunwoo, rubbing at his nape. “Sorry, man, I just started like three weeks ago, he might, but I just don’t—Jaehyun!” he then roars. The dining couple looks mildly disturbed.
A head pokes out from behind the kitchen door.
“Is the fry cook’s name Minho?” asks Sunwoo, still hollering across the diner.
Jaehyun scoffs, emerging fully from the kitchen. “No?”
“Oh.” Sunwoo juts a thumb over his shoulder at Jisung, who’s beginning to feel like he’s causing a scene. “It’s just this guy says he knows a Minho who works here.”
Jaehyun locks eyes with Jisung, lifts his brows, twists a kitchen rag between his hands. “Minho? Like, yea big?” He gestures by his cheekbone. At Jisung’s nod, he smiles, albeit confused. “He hasn’t worked here for a year, at least.”
Jisung deflates, dumbfounded. “Oh.”
Sunwoo sets his elbows on the stand. “I can still get you a table?”
Jisung blinks in a flurry, pocketing his hands. “Uh, thanks. I’m good.” The bell rings on his way out.
Jisung is awake when the front door opens and closes with a gentle touch, when Minho slips into the bedroom, deposits his bag on the floor and shuts himself into the bathroom. Jisung listens to the water run, and it lulls his heavy eyelids shut, but he snaps awake the moment the mattress dips beside him.
Minho’s out like a light. On his side, facing Jisung, his hands are tucked up close to his chest, fingers softly curled. Must’ve been a long night, wherever he’d been, if he couldn’t work up the energy to shut the curtains like he always did in anticipation of the nearing sunrise.
There’s a faint, blueish glow from a too-close neighbor’s TV flickering over his skin, casting peaky eyelash shadows on his cheeks. Jisung reaches out, brushes his fingertip against the nail on Minho’s pointer finger. Watches his tongue poke out to wet his lips, tracks the soft flare of his nostrils as he breathes, the little freckle on one of them.
Jisung’s chest aches. The question isn’t so much what are you hiding from me, but why?
When Jisung surfaces from his dream, no longer on a cotton-candy-colored beach on a habitable exoplanet but sweaty and flustered in Minho’s bed, he knows he’s in trouble.
It’s not an immediate threat. If he peeks to his right, he’ll see Minho, dead to the world until noon at the earliest. But it, whatever it is, is soul-crushing, gut-churning, simply enough to have Jisung slinking out of bed before—he checks his phone—fucking eight in the morning on a Sunday and beelining for the bathroom.
He only feels safe enough to reflect once the hot water’s pelting down his back in the shower. He rests his forehead to the cool tile of the wall, licks away the water dripping from his lips.
So. Yeji. She’s back in his dreamscape, lavender-skinned and curly-horned. He’d had his face between her legs on the pink sand, which—fine. It’s not like Jisung hasn’t thought about her like that since they’d reverted to being friends—which they’d never really known how to be, but that’s beside the point.
He clenches his eyes shut, fingernails scraping the grout between the tiles. Relives the scene in his head, the one he’d startled awake from, as vividly as he can manage before it slips from his grasp forever.
Three moons rising over the horizon on the turquoise sea. Jisung giving his alien-ified ex great head. Strong fingers curling into the back of his hair, pressing him in—his mouth is wet, chin dripping. His nose, too. He can barely breathe, but that’s the way he likes it. Then the fingers drag him up, tug his head back, but when he peels open his eyes, Yeji’s watching him emptily with those big, bottomless eyes, her hands free.
It’s Minho who’s holding him up. Minho, pale blue, fanged and black-sclera’ed. Cute little horns, too, peeking out from his hair, but—fuck.
Jisung’s chest rushes.
“Having a good time, Jisungie?” breathes Minho, tightening his fist in Jisung’s hair.
Jisung nods the best he can.
“Yeah?” Minho smiles. “You wanna keep going?”
Again, he nods. Frantic, this time. Eager. Desperate.
“On her or on me?”
Yeji laughs.
Jisung sees white as he comes over his fist, over the subway tile.
Of Minho’s shower. In Minho’s apartment.
“Fuck,” he whines, unsticking his eyelids. He doesn’t even remember getting a hand on himself. That’s when he’d awoken, too, before he could get a glimpse of Minho’s alien cock.
Is he disappointed?
Jisung shakes his head. He’s more dizzy than anything, trying to angle his hands under the shower spray to hose away the evidence of his pathetic state.
It’s a first, is what it is. And he can’t help but wonder if it’s because he’s been thinking about Yeji overtime that the conversation they’d had months ago had crept down his brain pathways into his unconscious.
Or if he’s actually been thinking about Minho overtime.
Jisung cleans himself up. Uses Minho’s soap, which he feels abominably guilty for only once he’s already in the act.
Fuck. It’s okay. Jisung’s had a lot of fucked up dreams in his twenty-three years. He can get his act together, the same way he had when he’d had that waterpark dream about his junior year biology teacher and turned in his dissection lab report early—with a smile—the next day.
He’ll go buy Minho coffee. Maybe breakfast, too, since he still feels weird about fiddling with Minho and Seungmin’s appliances. And he’ll have it all ready for him like the bestest friend ever by the time Minho totters out of bed at one all cute and puffy-eyed and none the wiser.
changbin
911
changbin
… hello
i said 911????
chris
did you need something?
changbin
i said 911 it’s implied.
dad wants me to schmooze some investors tonight
i need moral support
from
…
my esteemed colleagues
changbin
come onnnnnnnnn
drinks on me obviously
i have the company card
jisung
anything for daddy (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
changbin
ok jisung ur out
chris?
jisung
NO PLEASE I WANT TO GO
changbin
..
fine
these are desperate times we’re in
pls dress respectably
not like soundcloud rappers
chris
O
changbin
and if u have nothing respectable in ur closet
report to mine by 9:30
jisung
i don’t even know where u live???
changbin
christopher save this man
chris
i’ll pick you up dude
chris
wait jisung where do you live?
“You better have hella deep pockets, dude, if you’re gonna keep that up.”
It’s Chris. Jisung barely hears him over the pulsing beat of the Rihanna song the DJ’s just cranked up, mostly because his senses are otherwise occupied. Not five feet away, there’s a girl swinging around a pole onstage in eight-inch heels and a dress with little heart cutouts on the nipples.
“Pockets?” mutters Jisung, blinking owlishly.
Chris cackles beside him, claps a hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, man. You’re in the front, she keeps making eye contact. When she comes down and gives you a lap dance you need to have your fat stacks ready. It’s simple etiquette.”
“Eye contact?” Jisung looks away rapidly, finding Chris’ face awash in magenta light. “I—I don’t carry cash! Who the fuck carries cash these days?”
Chris stares blankly. “People who go to strip clubs.” He grabs Jisung by the elbow. “We need to move to the back, buddy. Or find the ATM.”
In all fairness, Changbin had just said they’d do dinner, then the club. Just some club. Not strip club, gentlemen’s club… whatever.
It’s a fine establishment, really. Classy, roomy, not too humid, clean but for the scattered cash around the stages at the ends of the dancers’ sets. Over the top, though. Glamorous. Jisung reckons the combined net worth of the clientele could buy the place a thousand times over.
So, yeah. He doesn’t belong here, an impostor sharing the air in Changbin’s Gucci slides (Jisung’s combat boots hadn’t made the cut, and his bare feet wouldn’t have either had it not been too late for Changbin to whisk him off to a pedicure and had he not lacked the machinery to simply cut them off) but luckily neither does Chris, who seems to have the opposite problem of Jisung. He can’t look even remotely in the dancers’ direction.
Changbin’s holding court by the bar with the investors—dull middle-aged men in Alexander McQueen and Armani—or, he had been. Now that Jisung’s actually looking, he’s nowhere to be seen.
“Nine one one,” Changbin hisses, popping up behind them.
Chris startles, nearly taking a tumble into the tray of the passing shot girl. “Dude!” he gripes.
“For real this time,” says Changbin, latching onto both their shoulders. He nods toward his company, well-postured despite their listless wristwatch-glances. “This isn’t working. My gaydar’s fucking imploded. We’re moving to plan B. Or… plan G, if our character set is LGBTQ.” Changbin rotates Chris until they’re eye to eye, then pulls out his phone. “What’s your place called?”
“My place?” echoes Chris, affronted. “I don’t—fucking own it.”
“Fine,” mutters Changbin, eyes glued to his phone, “where is it you go when you’re in a mood and wanna pay some Pretty Young Thing to shake his ass on you and listen to you talk about your sad life, not necessarily in that order?”
Chris gives Jisung a passing side-eye. The club is dimly-lit, but Jisung’s seen him flustered by artists and his seniors at work enough times to know when he’s blushing. Through gritted teeth, Chris yields, “It’s called Frost.”
Changbin pats him on the shoulder. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Then he puts on his time is money smile. “Car’ll be out front in two.” He strides over to the bar to inform the rest of their party.
“That’s why you know about etiquette. You’re a seasoned client,” murmurs Jisung through a smirk. “Just not here.”
Chris pinches the bridge of his nose. “Shut up.”
Once Changbin takes care of their cover at Frost, him and his associates are gone. All Jisung manages to catch is VIP room and then Changbin’s shooting them a harried goodbye-finger-gun over his shoulder.
Jisung’s left with Chris. They hover in the shadows near the back as Jisung takes in the scenery. It’s not far different from the club they’d just left, except the guys up onstage are, well. Guys.
“You come here often?” Jisung asks Chris in jest, if only because he’s stiff as a board like he doesn’t come here ever.
“I’m not here every week, if that’s what you’re asking,” mutters Chris, arms flexed tight across his chest.
“Hey, man, I don’t judge,” Jisung says coolly, though he feels anything but. A cluster of women at a table nearby bursts into squeals. Under the beams of gyrating light, Jisung sees them tuck twenties under the briefs waistband of the dancer leaning against the stage. “Well, Changbin doesn’t seem to be coming back anytime soon, so—”
“No, we should stay,” Chris resolves. “We should stay. In case he needs us, y’know.” Then he sighs, pastes on a smile and nods toward the seating. “Sorry, just been a while. Shall we?”
They settle into armchairs clustered around a candlelit table. It seems like a fire hazard, given the frequent flinging of garments, until Jisung realizes it’s an electric tea light. He still doesn’t have any cash on him, but they’re tucked far enough away from the stage that he can’t quite see well enough to make the I’ll pay you to come hither eyes Chris has already warned him about.
Sweat gathers under Jisung’s collar. This one particular security guard in the corner really looks like he wants to beat him up for no reason. Chris is suddenly sipping something mature on the rocks, nodding to the beat of the music and looking far more at ease than when they’d come in. The club is filling up, too—it was nearing midnight the last time Jisung checked his phone. Changbin and the investors are still MIA, though Jisung supposes that’s a win for VirtuoSeo.
He slumps lower in his seat, wipes the condensation from his beer off on his jeans and casts his gaze toward the stage. He thinks the tearaway pants gimmick is a little cheesy, but the dancer’s moves are fine, he supposes, fine enough for Jisung to zone out on him, for the dancer and the music to change. Now there’s a lithe blonde onstage, kind of twinky and harnessed in black, flirting with the pole. His schtick is a one-eighty from the muscle pig who came before, and he’s barefooted, points his toes as he twirls around the pole like a ballerina, like Yeji. Like Minho.
An approaching voice, warped by the pulsing music: “Christopher, is that you?” A familiar laugh. “You gave me a scare. I really thought I’d seen the last of you.”
Chris grins, bashful, almost, and sets his glass on the table. “Doubt you were worried,” he calls, and Jisung tears his eyes off the blonde boy onstage.
“Not worried.” The voice is crystal clear now that it’s near enough—now that it’s here, leaning its thick forearms on their table, the neck of a black, silky shirt gaping open to the bottommost button. “Just… sad. I missed your accent.”
Jisung’s last gulp of beer catches in his throat as his eyes trail from the forearms up to the bare neck. Up to Minho’s face.
Chris laughs. In Jisung’s periphery, he probably surrenders to some nervous habit—rubs at his earlobe, his jaw. Jisung doesn’t look. He’s so close to Minho that he thinks he might even slip under his radar.
“Ah, you missed my money,” ribs Chris.
Minho smiles, wily and crooked. His lash lines are smoked out in black, and every piercing in his ear is filled—the ones that Jisung can see. “That, too,” says Minho. He drums his fingers on the table, stands up straight. He’s in shiny black hot pants that stretch around the tops of his thighs—latex, maybe. Rubber?
It’s possible Jisung’s swallowed his tongue. And only when Minho, eyes wandering, says airily, “We could pick up where we left off, then, if you wanna hit the champagne room,” does he finally lock eyes with Jisung. Jisung, who’s one with the chair now, petrified.
Minho looks at him, into him, through him. Looks him up and down. “Brought friends, did you, Chris?” asks Minho without looking away. His inscrutable eyes burn through Jisung, daring him to react.
“Uh—yeah. We’re here with someone, actually, which is why I don’t know if it’d be a good idea for me to step out, even for—”
“I think this one wants a private room,” Minho interrupts, taking Jisung’s limp hand from the armrest and hauling him to his feet. “Don’t you?”
“What,” utters Jisung, but something in Minho’s dark eyes screams non-negotiable.
Chris is probably confused. No, definitely confused, but he only says, “Uh—really?”
“We’ll be quick, Christopher.” Minho intertwines their fingers, guides Jisung out between the tables toward a curtained doorway at the back.
Jisung doesn’t dare look back at Chris. He can barely meet the eyes of the security guard they pass.
The private room is one of many luxe curtained-off alcoves. Some of the drapes hang shut, shadows dancing underneath, and Minho shoves Jisung into the nearest open one so hard he can’t help but stumble onto the couch. Minho then whisks the curtains shut behind them, and the moody, red overhead lighting doesn’t really help Jisung pretend he hasn’t descended into the pits of hellfire.
But Minho is calm as he turns, eyes Jisung with… something like disdain. “What are you doing here,” he asks flatly.
Jisung scrambles to sit upright. The leather under his fingers is slippery, a bit worn. Instead of looking at Minho’s face, he’s stuck on that bare triangle of chest. “Chris already said—”
“That’s your Chris,” Minho states.
Jisung meets his eyes.
Minho merely licks his lips, settles his hands on his hips. Stares off into the corner of their alcove. “Of course it is.” His toe taps the floor a few times. “Of course it is.”
Jisung decides he’ll wait to wrap his mind around the fact that his Chris is apparently Minho’s Chris, too, that Chris knows Minho, or… knows this Minho.
Jisung doesn’t.
“This isn’t the diner,” Jisung says, quiet. The longer Minho’s eyes avoid him, the more he shrinks into the couch.
But then Minho looks to him, sighs out his nose. “It’s not,” he murmurs. He’s silent, contemplative, until, “We can talk at home, okay?”
Jisung sits ramrod straight. “Then why’d you bring me back here?”
“Panicked.” Minho shrugs, offers Jisung his hand again. “It’s three hundred an hour if you wanna stay.” Jisung chokes on air, but it’s worth it to see Minho smile. “Five hundred for the bigger rooms,” Minho adds.
“Fuck me,” Jisung breathes, and Minho chuckles. Jisung gets up just fine on his own, drags his sweaty palms down the sides of his pants. They’re alone, he’s talking to Minho, so it kind of makes sense that he can’t find it in himself to look anywhere else, but also… he can’t look anywhere else.
Jisung clears his throat. “You look nice.”
Minho freezes where he’s reaching for the curtain, lifts his brows. “Nice?”
“Yeah.” Jisung swallows, face hot, and flaps a hand at the air. “Nice. Sexy, whatever. You’re clearly…” He nods at Minho. “Achieving what it is you’re going for.”
Minho’s eyes narrow, but his lips quirk, too. “What I’m going for. Okay. Thanks, Jisungie.” He lifts the curtain to let Jisung through, who then jumps when Minho pats him on the ass. “You look good with your hair like that.”
Jisung’s hand flies up, fingers grazing his forehead. Changbin had taken a comb and some wax and, with surprising adeptness, forcibly done it for him in under a minute. He chokes on his words, though, only manages to catch Minho’s playful grin.
Jisung feels no sense of closure making his way down the hall and back out into the club with Minho at his back. “What should I tell Chris?” he asks over his shoulder.
“Just say I thought you were someone else.” Minho stops him with a hand on his wrist just once they’ve passed the security guard. “And I go by Lino here, okay?”
Jisung blinks. “What—”
“In case Chris mentions a Lino. That’s me.” Minho seems to scrutinize Jisung’s eyes, then nudges his fingers into the curve of his bottom again. “Go on. I’ll see you at home.”
Jisung obeys, picks his way back over to Chris. When he looks backward, Minho’s gone.
Chris is where they’d left him, glass empty, when Jisung resumes his seat. “What was that about?” Chris grins and wiggles his brows.
Jisung snorts, shakes his head. “He, uh—he mistook me for someone else.”
“Huh,” muses Chris. Jisung expects him to prod further, but the blonde boy from the stage earlier is making his rounds table to table, offering lap dances, and theirs is next. Chris seems to devote every shred of his energy to politely declining.
“Suit yourself,” hums the blonde, fingers skimming Chris’ shoulder as he sweeps past.
Chris looks distressed even through the smile he forces for Jisung.
Changbin has a second driver drop Jisung and Chris off separate from his esteemed—ultimately very champagne-drunk—associates. After Minho’d wandered off, Chris hadn’t brought him up, so Jisung hadn’t, either. Changbin had found them both half-asleep in a corner booth, kissed the tops of their heads to thank them for their service, and herded them out to a car.
Now Jisung’s home—at Minho and Seungmin’s. When he’d come in, all the lights had been off, Gretchen and Seungmin probably sealed behind Seungmin’s closed bedroom door, but Jisung’s not sure he would’ve known what to ask him—how to ask—anyway. Did you know? Probably. It’s Jisung who’s the clueless idiot here, Seungmin who’d jumped just at the mention of milkshakes.
Jisung’s still lying awake when he hears the front door unlatch, click shut. He’s too slow to feign sleep and Minho enters, makeup-free in a windbreaker and sweatpants, catches him with his eyes open. But Minho merely gives him a small smile and a wave, leaves his bag and goes for the shower.
Like always.
The sun is beginning to rise outside when Minho returns. Jisung struggles to pull the curtains shut whilst remaining maximally lazy and not lifting his torso from the mattress, but then Minho gets on his knees on the bed, does it for him.
He sits cross-legged next to Jisung, hands tucked in his lap, damp hair falling into his eyes.
Jisung watches him, head on the throw pillow. He wants… what he wants is to stretch out Minho’s t-shirt, crawl inside with him, hold him. Jisung mumbles, “Are you tired? We can just—”
“No,” says Minho, picking at his nails. “I mean, yes, but I’m also kind of wired right now, I dunno.” He licks his lips, peeks at Jisung from under his bangs. “I’m sorry.”
Jisung makes a garbled nose. “Don’t—why would you apologize—”
“I did lie to you.” Minho shrugs. “About the diner.”
Jisung is silent. Then, “I know.” His hands find Minho’s leg, nearly knock him off balance trying to drag his calf into his arms to hug. “I went there.”
Minho’s shifting to accommodate him when his eyes go wide. “You did?” He blinks. “When?”
Jisung notices then that Minho’s calf is smooth under his palms, hairless. “Uh… couple weeks ago. Jaehyun says hi. Just kidding, he didn’t say anything, but he did remember you, I think.”
Minho’s brow is crinkled. “And you didn’t tell me you went.” He looks baffled, eyelids fluttering. “When did you get good at keeping secrets, Jisungie?”
Jisung smiles slightly, thumbs the knobs of Minho’s knee. “I guess I figured you were keeping this one for a reason.”
Minho drums his fingers against the mattress a while. Watches them. “I thought I had a reason.” He sits back, leaning into his palms, presses his knee firmer into Jisung’s chest, right where his heart thumps. “But now I can’t think of one.”
Jisung nods. He thinks he gets it. Maybe.
“I wouldn’t have known how to bring it up. Even if I’d wanted to,” says Minho, quiet.
The rises and falls of Jisung’s chest are steady against Minho’s leg. His heart lurches a hair faster every time they press together tight. “Seungmin?” says Jisung.
“Mm.” Minho snorts. “Late shifts at the diner that paid really shitty and me being late on the rent every month turned into late shifts at the diner that, y’know, suddenly raked in six hundred bucks on a decent night. I stopped missing rent.” He shrugs. “I just wanted him to know I wouldn’t be so flaky. And, I guess… why I could promise I wouldn’t be so flaky.”
Jisung knows how Minho hates owing things. He’s never once let Jisung even buy him dinner if Jisung wasn’t somehow previously indebted—which he usually was. He owed most of his high school debts to late-night texts to Minho; dude i dont get paid til next fri but im dying can u pls postmates me chicken plsssssss i love u babie (っ˘̩╭╮˘̩)っ.
“I count my cash when you’re at work,” Minho continues. “In case you were curious.”
Jisung thinks of Minho at the club, of Minho approaching Chris all dolled-up and coy-mouthed, luring him into an hourly-rate room. To how many men—how many people he’s done the very same, four or five nights a week for a whole year. He swallows. “Just—sorry, I just want to, uh. Is it safe?”
Minho lifts his brows. “Is it safe being a stripper?”
Jisung’s face heats. He’s not sure why he bothered with delicacy. “Yeah. Like. Is it ever… dangerous? Do you get, like, treated… treated right?”
Minho looks at him a moment, then smiles softly and pinches the tip of Jisung’s nose between his knuckles. “There are good and bad customers like anywhere else, Jisungie. Good and bad coworkers, too. But, um.” He clears his throat, and then Jisung loses their thread of eye contact, no matter how hard he telepathically tries to beg for it back. “There are body guards. And rules. I’ve been working there a while. I have good rapport with the guards, the owner. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, you know? Of course some shitheads will try, but then I get them kicked out. Doesn’t happen often.”
Jisung nods. Worms his way down on the mattress to settle his chin against Minho’s knee.
“I don’t want you worrying about me,” murmurs Minho, “now that you know.”
Jisung can’t promise that. He knows Minho can stand his ground, probably defend himself better than Jisung ever could, but he’s been worrying about him alone in the city long before he knew strangers had their eyes and hands on him every night. “I’ll try.”
“That’s all I ask.” Minho’s lips purse into a little smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
Jizung nuzzles into Minho’s kneecap. “You don’t have to explain anything to me, obviously, but.” He points at the pole, the one in the middle of the bedroom.
Minho follows his finger, laughs too loud for this eerily silent time of night—morning. “That.” He smiles. “That was here when we moved in, actually. Some old tenant installed it and the landlord gave them grief but not enough to rip it out, apparently. It… might’ve given me some ideas, I guess, when I was fucking around with the idea of maybe not auditioning for a whole five seconds of my life.”
Jisung stares at the pole until his vision goes fuzzy around the edges. “Can you…? Y’know.”
“Can I do shit on the pole?”
“Yeah.”
Minho looks amused. “Oh, yes.”
Jisung's eyes narrow. “Why’d you say it like that?”
“I just think it’d surprise you.”
Jisung laughs. Minho’s squinty smile is genuine now, and it makes his chest feel lighter. Floaty, even. “Me? Surprised, seeing you do a backflip on a pole in your underwear?” He scoffs, mocking. “Who do you think I am?”
Minho shoves his knee hard enough into Jisung’s chest to knock some of the wind out of him. “You couldn’t handle me, Han, and you know it.” He says it so wryly it knocks the breath out of Jisung all over again. Sends his heart pumping all his blood up a one-way street to his head. And down south.
“Shut up,” wheezes Jisung, because he does know. “I’ve seen it all. Remember when you drunk-sleep-walked that one summer and peed in my laundry basket ‘cos you thought it was the toilet? Then went right back to bed?”
Minho makes a miserable attempt to keep a straight face. He grabs his pillow, slams it down over Jisung’s face, and hikes himself astride Jisung’s lap. “Tonight, you die.”
Jisung whacks the pillow away with too much ease. Usually Minho will suffocate him at least a little. But it’s also got to be six in the morning by now, and the way he’s looking down at Jisung, ass and thighs pinning him to the bed, is both saccharine and malicious but also sleepy. “You can’t let me die before I see your striptease,” Jisung murmurs pragmatically.
Minho coughs out a laugh, frees Jisung of his weight (thankfully). “Well, now you know where to find me.”
Jisung stares at the ceiling as Minho settles down beside him. “Do you like it?”
Minho gets comfy under the sheet, throws part of it over Jisung’s body. “Hm?” He leans on his elbow. “Dancing?”
Jisung nods. His eyes find Minho’s.
Minho’s eyes screw up. Then he frowns in thought. “I like the money. I like performing.” He shrugs. “That’s enough for now.”
Jisung licks his lips. “One last question.”
Minho chuckles. “Okay.”
“Did you fuck Chris?”
Minho’s laugh is like a howl. “What?”
Jisung blinks indignantly. “I don’t know! I swear you had, like, some chemistry going on there, or something!”
Minho tsks his tongue. “Jisungie… the statistical odds of someone opening their wallet for you if they think you like them and care about them… I don’t know what they are. Higher than if they think you don’t.” He sighs. “Nah, I like Chris. Nice guy. Mostly he pays me just to sit and chat, actually. But you should know the number one rule at Frost is no sex in the champagne room. Not everyone obeys, obviously, especially if you’ve got a big spender or a celebrity or something on your hands and you’re up for it, but the servers and guards are always going in and out and there’re cameras, too, so it’s not easy. That’s not to say I haven’t touched a couple dicks in my tenure, but I could count the times that’s happened on one hand.” Jisung’s already watching when Minho turns his head, smirking. “And no, Chris’ wasn’t one of them.”
Jisung thinks his thank god is mental, but then he’s actually sputtering it.
“And I’ve decided I don’t care.” Minho turns his back to Jisung. “You can go to work on Monday and be like, oh, you know Lino from the club? Yeah, we’ve been best friends since middle school. I watched him piss in my hamper once, and now I live in his room and there’s a stripper pole in there. Usually I’d say trust no bitch, but.” His shoulders rumple the sheet as he shrugs. “It’s a small world.”
For a while, Jisung watches Minho’s back. The half-baked light of dawn bleeds in through a crack in the curtains, haloes the lines of his broad shoulders. Jisung squirms over under their shared sheet and octopuses himself around Minho’s body.
Minho grunts. A few seconds crawl by. “You’re spooning me,” he mumbles, distant and drowsy.
Jisung noses into his neck. “I’m spooning you.”
“Why… s’too hot.”
“Just for a bit.” Jisung breathes him in. “You never did smell like diner food when you came home.”
“Mm. Always showered anyway.”
“But the cooking smell would stick in your hair.”
“Mm.”
“Love you.”
Minho laughs, faint. “Cute.”
“Say it back.”
“In the morning.”
“It’s the morning now.”
“Afternoon, then.”
“And if I’m dead by then?”
Witheringly, Minho sighs. He traces figure-eights around Jisung’s knuckles with his fingertip. “I love you, too, Jisung.”
Jisung’s heart does a gymnastics perfect ten.
The contemporary, barely-decipherable analog clock in the twenty-fifth floor break room reads something like 8:20pm—or, fuck, maybe 9:20?—as Jisung toils away at the espresso machine fixing himself and Changbin and Chris double shot Americanos. It’s Thursday but they’re planning on staying late as twelve hours from now, Changbin will be on a flight to Incheon and won’t be back for two weeks.
Jisung’s melted over the counter, supervising the dribble of the fifth shot, when his phone buzzes. He glances toward it half-heartedly where it’s face-up on the counter.
wifey
jisungieeeeeeeee~
when you get home can you feed my fire escape babies
fucking mta delays threw me off i forgot to before i had to go
Jisung drops his forehead to the counter. Groans at length. He’s lucky the studio is halfway across the floor, and that it’s otherwise deserted this time of night.
Then he stands, swipes up his phone.
if lost return to wifey
what’s on the menu today?
a caviar amuse-bouche followed by spit-roasted nyc pigeon i shoot down myself?
with the assistance of my trusty hunting hound gretchen?
A bubble appears as Minho types.
wifey
ha ha ha hah a ahah ha ah.
just don’t forget
if lost return to wifey
might be later than usual 😣
wifey
it’s ok still earlier than me right
they’re hardy
they’ll wait for their daddy~
Jisung stares a good thirty seconds at that last message. Then he locks his phone, promptly unlocks it, and calls Yeji.
She picks up just when he thinks it’ll go to voicemail. “Sung?”
Jisung sets his eyes menacingly on the graphic-print wallpaper opposite. “You poisoned me.”
He sees her squint, hears the sound of a door closing. “Sung.”
“What?”
“I’m in the middle of adult ballet right now.”
Jisung gapes, then. “You’re teaching a class and you left your students unattended? What kind of professional—”
“You’ve never voice-called me in your life! I thought it was an emergency!”
Jisung blinks. That’s right. He hates phone calls. “It’s… not an emergency. I guess.”
“I’m co-teaching, anyway.” Yeji sighs. “Training someone new. They’re holding down the fort. Can you make it quick, though?”
Jisung’s at a loss. Again, he stammers, “You… you poisoned me.”
Yeji’s voice is firm this time. “Sung…”
“Remember my alien dreams?”
A pause. “Unfortunately.”
“I—”
“I always thought you’d grow out of them.”
“Well, I didn’t, big surprise there.”
Yeji laughs.
“And you never dressed up like her for Halloween like you said you would!”
“A, too much purple body paint. B, it’d have been too weird explaining to people I was cosplaying my alienverse self from my boyfriend’s sex dreams.”
“They weren’t all sex dreams. Some were romantic.”
“Uh-huh. So, what? You’re still having alien sex dreams about me? That’s why you’re calling?”
“No.” Jisung gnaws at his lower lip. “Yes. But—also no. Remember when you said I was into guys?”
“Vividly.”
He hesitates. “Into Minho?”
Yeji makes a sudden, exaggerated, very smug hum of recognition.
Jisung whimpers. “You poisoned me.”
“What color?”
“Hm?”
“What color alien is he? Just curious.”
Jisung glares at the wall, starts pacing to and fro. “Light blue. But that’s not the point.”
“Okay. So… you’re into Minho. I already knew that. Square one, Hanniebun.”
“It’s your fault.”
“It’s my fault?”
Jisung kicks his boot at the floor, clenches his free hand in an Arthur meme fist. “Yeah. I’ve known Minho for a decade and never once did I have an alien sex dream about him. Cut to a few months after you claim I liked him, and I suddenly start wanting to, like—kiss him! On the lips! And hold his hand so people mistake us for a couple ‘cos I like how it feels!” He slices the air with his hand conclusively. “Poisoned!”
Yeji says nothing.
Jisung freezes with eyes wide, looks at the mug on the espresso machine. Wonders if it’s gone cold. “Yeji?”
“Shut up for a second.”
“Okay,” he answers meekly. Waits for her to speak.
“I didn’t mean to make assumptions about you, Sungie, okay? What I said over the summer… I hope it didn’t, like, seem like I was speculating. It was just a feeling I had. But… anyway. Maybe you didn’t ever like Minho like that and I didn’t plant some evil seed in you. Maybe you’re just single for the first time, like, literally ever, and you’re in a new city working a new job and you’re seeing Minho in a new light. Could just be that.” She takes a breath. “Or… maybe you just needed a nudge to realize what’s been right in front of you all along.”
Jisung traipses across the break room to the couch, where he sprawls lengthwise and massages at his brow. “Why are you always so profound?”
“Being your better half made me more profound, I think.”
Jisung hums, slings his arm over his eyes to shield himself from the fluorescent ceiling lights. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, Sung.”
“I think I could’ve stayed at home with you forever and died there and been buried in that graveyard that now has a Wendy’s next door and been perfectly happy.”
Yeji hums in thought. “Yeah, maybe. Happy because we wouldn’t have known what we were missing.”
Jisung slides his arm off his face, sits up abruptly. “What were you missing?!”
Yeji laughs softly. “I have to go.”
“Okay.” Jisung pouts. “Miss you. Love you.”
“Bye, Sung.”
“Say it back, Hwang!” he demands, but the line goes dead.
The coffees are cold. Jisung dumps them out in the sink and starts again. He’s drifting to asleep against the counter when Changbin comes looking for him, wakes him up with a holler that shouldn’t echo in as tight a space as the break room, with a tight hug and a spin that lifts Jisung’s feet right off the floor.
“Seungmin.”
Seungmin doesn’t flinch but for the barest purse of his lips. Jisung takes it as an invitation to continue.
“You know how Minho’s… kind of in a mood?”
Now Seungmin lifts a brow, lets his book drop open on the counter. “You and I were both there when he said I should insert the slices of my gyeran mari one by one up my ass, right?”
Jisung snorts in the back of his throat, but manages to hold a straight face. “Yes.” He scratches at his neck. “He also said to not forget the ketchup.”
Seungmin’s eyes drop back to his book. “That should answer your question.”
“But I have a second question.” Jisung tries to squirm into Seungmin’s field of vision. “Can I borrow some money?”
Seungmin squints at him, and it says you already live in my apartment basically for free. “For…”
“I just think…” Jisung drums his hands against the countertop. “Minho said he didn’t want to go to work.”
“Minho said many things.”
“Minho said he didn’t want to go to work but he went.”
“You know he sets his own schedule, right? He doesn’t have to go in if he doesn’t want to.”
Jisung forges ahead. “It’s Saturday night, he doesn’t wanna miss the big bucks! But I just think… it’d be nice if I could buy just an hour of his time tonight so he doesn’t have to spend it putting on a facade or acting as someone’s therapist.”
Seungmin’s eyes narrow slowly. “I’m… pretty sure you know an hour of Minho’s time is worth way more than an hour of yours or mine.”
“Exactly! So can I have two hundred bucks?”
Seungmin chokes, incredulous. “Jisung—”
“Please!” Jisung sinks to a squat behind the counter, leaves his hands and chin resting on its edge. Hopes the shine of the pendant lights above hits his pupils in a cute way. “I’ll pay you back in…” He mentally calculates his payroll schedule. “Six days! You can collect interest in the form of my eternal gratitude and—and I’ll buy you dinner!”
Seungmin stares at him flatly. “You’re gonna shell out two hundred dollars—”
“Five hundred. Three hundred are my own.”
“You’re gonna pay five hundred fucking dollars to sit with Minho for an hour?”
“Yes!” Jisung says shrilly. “And… dude, come on, it’s Minho. It’ll all come full circle. He’ll end up buying us dinner with that money.”
Seungmin blinks. Several times. “So you basically want me to buy myself dinner… in advance.”
“Yes.” Jisung springs up, laces his fingers together, and pouts theatrically.
“Two hundred dollars worth of dinner.”
“Plus the interest you’ll get back!”
“In the form of your gratitude.” Seungmin rolls his eyes. When he looks back to his book with his shoulders hunched, Jisung knows he’s won. “I don’t have cash.”
Jisung smiles from ear to ear. “Just Venmo me and I’ll stop at an ATM on the way.”
Never in his life has Jisung had so many twenty dollar bills on his person.
It feels dangerous.
As does getting sized up by the six-foot-four bouncer at Frost.
He belongs even less now that he’s not a sheep dressed in Changbin’s clothing, just a sheep in sheep’s clothing. And he realizes, as he orders a drink at the bar, that the cover and the beer are cutting even deeper into his budget than anticipated, and he hadn’t really even come here with a game plan in the first place.
Jisung ducks hastily into the nearest seat when the thought crosses his mind that fuck, what if he sees Chris here? He loves the guy, but, honestly, that’s the last thing he wants right now—
A hand closes over his shoulder. “Are you spying on me?”
Jisung whips around.
Minho’s hair is tousled, his lips tinted ruddy. He’s dressed like a Playboy bunny, minus the corset, with little black shorts over his sheer tights.
Tights.
It’s a wonder Jisung doesn’t die right there.
“No!” His bottle nearly slips from his grip as he stands, digs in his jeans pocket for the wad of cash. “Hey, I was, um—I’m glad you found me, actually.”
“I just got off stage.” A beam of light streaks over Minho’s face and chest, makes the little beads of sweat on his skin twinkle neon green.
“Right, um.” So he’d just missed that, then. Balls. He lifts the bundle of cash between them, like a fool. Definitely like a fool. “You said it was five hundred for the VIP room?”
Minho looks between the money and Jisung’s face. “For an hour.”
“Yep.”
Minho regards him, detached. “What game are you playing at, Jisung?”
The question catches Jisung unawares. “Game? I—” His words get jumbled, like they so often do. He hasn’t even had a sip of his drink. Course-correcting, he clears his throat. “I just… know you weren’t feeling so hot earlier, and, like, probably also not feeling up to entertaining some old dudes with marriage problems so I thought we could. Just. Hang out.” He blinks. “Here.”
Minho’s lips part. He searches Jisung’s face, long enough for the last chorus of the song playing to start and fade out, then takes him by the wrist.
The VIP room is lit dimly by purple recessed lights that glow under the couch hugging the corner, under the little stage. Minho lets the doorway curtains swish shut behind them, plucks the bunny ears from his head and tosses them onto the couch, turns off the music already playing. Then he veers around to cling to Jisung’s neck.
“Dumbass,” he whispers into Jisung’s shoulder. Squeezes him tight. “I’ll buy you so much ice cream.”
They’ve laid all over each other in their swim trunks on the beach, yet Jisung has to really control the tremble of his hands as he wraps his arms, fully-clothed, around Minho’s naked middle. “Seungmin, too.”
Minho laughs into his shoulder, pitches his weight forward. “You ripped Seungmin off?”
“Hey, I told him exactly how I’d be using his money.”
Minho draws back. “And still he gave in. Hm. Thought he was smarter than that.” He traipses toward the couch, drops to it heavily. Pats the seat beside him. “Come sit in your five hundred dollar spot, Jisungie.”
Jisung lets out a flustered laugh. Then the curtains whip open.
“Thank god. Solace.” It’s the blonde twink from the stage, when he and Chris had visited last. He’s dressed just like Minho, and he too tears the bunny ears from his head, throws them on the floor, and strides over to claim Jisung’s five hundred dollar seat. “The fucking Jennifer dude is here. It was months ago that I told him to call me Jin, and, like, okay, he’s an old dude, maybe he misheard me and that’s why he calls me Jen, but, like, he also comes asking around for a Jen whenever he’s looking for me, and everyone’s always like who the fuck is Jen but it just never penetrates his Paleolithic skull—also I’m pretty sure his ex-wife’s name is Jennifer!”
Minho’s gawping at their visitor, affronted. “Hyunjin, I could’ve been with a customer!”
“They wouldn’t’ve minded. Double the fun.” Hyunjin grins, stretches out his long stockinged legs. “But like, also, you’re not? It’s just Jisung.” He nods at—at Jisung. “I saw you guys come back here.”
Jisung blinks. “Do I know you?”
“I’m Hyunjin.”
There might as well be crickets to fill the silence that follows. Jisung fiddles with the cash now in his pocket. Hyunjin looks between Jisung and Minho. “No? Hyunjin? No ringing bells?” He slouches back against the cushions. “Okay, so Minho’s told you nothing about me! Sick.”
Minho’s preoccupied with a new run in his tights. “I didn’t tell Jisungie about the club ’til recently.” He peers at Jisung, who sets his beer down on the counter and goes to sit on the couch’s unoccupied half.
Hyunjin pouts. “But before I was your stripper friend, I was your school friend!” His blonde tresses skim his shoulders as he turns on Jisung. “We had Hip-hop Foundations together and he was the teacher’s pet.”
Jisung cracks a smile though Minho looks ready to grab Hyunjin by the cute bowtie around his neck and throttle him. “I wouldn’t take it personally. Minho didn’t tell me for two weeks when he got into Juilliard, I had to find out about it from his mom. He also didn’t tell me when he got his wisdom teeth out—literally just dropped off the face of the earth and turned up a week later like nothing had happened.”
Hyunjin snorts. “But I know all about you. I’ve seen so many pictures of you I feel like I went to your mom’s for Christmas and did the whole baby-in-the-bath photos tour. I’ve heard all about J.ONE and, contrary to popular belief, your beats can be studied to… sort of. I used them to warm up for one of my dance practicals. Which counts, I think.”
Minho looks weary. Murderous. “Hyunjin…”
“Me and Minho started working here together, y’know, so we could keep an eye on each other. I still have hella debt, so.” Hyunjin’s eyes form dark crescents when he smiles at Jisung. “But it kinda worked out nice, I think, that we’d danced together at school. Sometimes we perform here together, you should come watch. The straight-girl bachelorettes go crazy for it when we make out.”
“Are you done?” Still Minho.
Hyunjin then sits up straight, looks far more guileless in the face than his outfit would suggest. “I was just trying to throw Jennifer guy off my scent but, come to think of it, Jake owes me a favor, so…” He snatches his bunny ears from the floor. “I guess that’s my cue.” He’s halfway to the door when he twirls on the ball of his foot, fixates on Jisung. “Is your friend ever coming back?”
Jisung sits back. “My friend?”
Hyunjin nods. Peers past Jisung as he adjusts his bunny ears; some of the wall panels are mirrored. “He didn’t want a lap dance,” he mutters, dejected. “Always asks for Minho instead. Maybe he doesn’t like blondes?”
Minho rubs at the inner corners of his eyes, careful as not to smear his makeup. “He’s scared of you.”
Hyunjin glowers. “Bye Jisung-and-Minho.”
Once Hyunjin is gone, Jisung laces his fingers over his crossed legs, turns a grin on Minho.
Minho doesn’t see it. He has his head bowed, elbows on his knees, fingers laced behind his neck.
“You have so many friends I don’t know about,” Jisung remarks, amused. “It’s kind of embarrassing, the fact that they know my face and my SoundCloud before they’ve even met me when I don’t even know they fucking exist.”
Minho runs his fingers through his hair as he rises. “I talk about you too much, apparently.” He shuffles across the room to the slightly archaic iPod plugged into the speaker system. “And Hyunjin talks too much, period.”
“You talk about me but not to me.”
“I talk to you,” argues Minho. Jisung is powerless simply to the way he cocks his hip as he browses through the music. “I talk to you about the important things.”
Jisung snorts. “I think it’s the opposite, actually. You talk to me about your fire escape cats and the Food Network. You never told me about Seungmin or Hyunjin or this.”
Minho’s eyes flit to him and away so fast Jisung thinks it must’ve just been a reflex, that he didn’t even notice. “Well, now you know about all three.” He pouts at the iPod, adds in a huff, “How dare you call my fire escape cats unimportant.”
“What else don’t you want me to know about?” He and Minho don’t really have serious talks. If they do, they’re bearably short. The only reason Minho’s letting this one go on, Jisung thinks, is because it’s straddling the line between jocular and meaningful.
Minho lifts his brows, sets the iPod down. The music starts quiet, swells to a steady beat that Jisung feels in his chest, but it’s not deafening like it is out by the main stage. “You really don’t want me to have anything of my own, do you?”
Jisung coughs out a laugh of disbelief. “Bit dramatic, don’t you think?”
Minho shrugs. Steps onto the platform, grabs onto the pole, looks at Jisung steadily, impassively. “Did you still wanna see me do a backflip on the pole in my underwear?”
“Are we gonna keep speaking in questions?”
“Did you want to or not?”
“Speak in questions?”
Minho levels him with a look.
Jisung’s lips twitch. He leans back, spreads his arms out along the back of the couch, and nods. “Fine. Show me what you’ve got.”
Minho’s eyes do half a roll, but he smiles faintly as he kicks his shoes off. He wraps loose fingers around the pole, walks a few circles around it on the balls of his feet. “I have a routine,” he explains, and he’s still clinging to the pole with just one arm as his feet lift weightlessly from the ground, touch back down a full turn later. “Usually I switch things up, y’know. Try new things out if I have regulars back here.” Minho’s eyes flash to him, as catlike as his smile. “But you’re a first-timer.”
Jisung exhales a laugh. “Go easy on me.”
“That is… not the goal.” Minho chuckles. His voice remains level as he twirls around, like he’s only getting a feel for it. “Obviously I can’t spill all my secrets. But just a few, to keep you coming back for more.” And at once he wraps both hands around the pole, defies gravity to turn himself upside down and hook his knee around the pole, frees a hand to give Jisung a mocking little jazz-hand motion as he revolves.
Jisung shakes his head, ears warm. Smiles and claps politely. “Ten out of ten.”
Minho rolls his eyes. “Heighten your expectations a bit, Jisungie.” Then inhales, clipped, and brings himself back down to his feet. “Sorry. Can’t get a good grip.” He sits on the edge of the stage, tears vigorously into his tights. The grating sound of ripping nylon makes Jisung’s hairs stand on end, and he watches as Minho contemplates how to get them off. Eventually, he says, “If you want us to stay friends, Jisungie, I’m gonna need you to close your eyes.”
Jisung frowns through a laugh, but does as he’s told. “You’ve changed in front of me before. What are you implying?”
“I don’t know.” Shuffling, as Minho changes out of his shorts, presumably. “I’m just saying shit.”
There’s a lump in Jisung’s throat. “Okay.”
“Open.” Minho’s back on the stage in his little shorts, tights shredded and discarded on the floor. He’s pacing again, around and around. Just about every muscle in Minho’s torso ripples as he coils one hand around the pole, kicks up through a handstand. Jisung loses track of where his center of gravity must be somewhere between the lines in Minho’s legs, how effortlessly the flexibility comes to him here like it had in the recitals Jisung always attended back home. Minho breezes around the pole, and were there threads attached to each of his big toes, he would’ve weaved himself into some complicated tangle. Then he’s holding himself perfectly horizontal, only with his fists and the crook of his neck against the pole. The strength it must take…
“Is this supposed to turn me on or make me jealous?” muses Jisung. Both, maybe. Minho cracks, laughing brightly as his feet sag to the floor.
“Mm.” He traipses off the stage to grab Jisung’s abandoned beer, take a gulp from it. “Sorry. I was showing off. Not sexy.”
“Showing off is sexy,” Jisung mutters. His shoes are suddenly very interesting under the purple light.
Minho chuckles, dabs the corners of his lips with the side of his hand. “I can do sexier.”
“I don’t doubt it.” And when they lock eyes, they share a smile that makes Jisung feel like he’s thirteen again.
Minho leans over the iPod, changes the song to something slower. More sensual. “Sorry I was kinda rude when Hyunjin was here.” He returns to the platform just as Jisung’s busy adjusting his jeans. “Some guy earlier, like, zero warning, just went to town licking my nipple. Pissed me off.”
Jisung scoffs. “Did you punch him?”
Minho smiles small. “He listened the first time.” He sinks down along the pole until he’s seated by its base. Uses it for balance as he lowers down to his back. Arches his spine from the floor, watching Jisung in the low light.
Jisung pulls at his collar. “Is this the routine?”
Minho nods. Smiles enough to show his teeth. He rolls backward over his shoulder, then grasps the pole, drags himself to his feet, slow, pointed toes skimming the floor. And he lifts away again, bends his knee around the pole, slides down it all the way back to the floor, where he turns onto his tummy with the pole still between his legs.
Jisung swallows audibly. The pole splits his view of Minho from behind, so as Minho drags his knees in, arms folded on the floor, he can see the way his shorts ride up the backs of his thighs.
Minho hugs the pole as he stands next, his cheek to it as he gazes at Jisung. “And… this is the part where I give someone a lap dance.”
Jisung blinks. “Someone?”
“I’m not always one-on-one in here.” Minho shrugs a shoulder. “So whoever wants it bad enough to be the first.” He steps off the platform, takes a few steps toward Jisung—Jisung, who’s helplessly watching the flesh of his thighs rub as he moves. His head jerks up when he realizes Minho’s directly in front of him. “Or the only.”
Jisung’s throat is dry but his beer’s too far out of reach. So he just goggles up at Minho, whose face is cast in soft shadows. “Hm?”
“I can show you?” It’s a question. Minho touches absently at the bowtie around his neck, as if remembering it’s there. He makes a face like it’s a nuisance and unclips it, lets it drop to the floor.
“Show me?”
“My routine.”
Jisung watches Minho lick his lips. Yes, he wants to know what Chris has seen of Minho, the side of him it feels like everyone but Jisung knows. “Yeah, okay.”
Minho nods. “I tell them to sit on their hands,” he says, and his voice is delicate, dances on tiptoes along the shell of Jisung’s ear before it permeates. “‘I touch you, you don’t touch me,’ etcetera.”
Jisung does so.
And Minho climbs into his lap, lays his hands on his shoulders.
Minho sat on Jisung’s lap until his thighs were numb one summer when they drove down to the Outer Banks in a car overcrowded with their high school friends. Jisung sat in Minho’s lap for a number of blackmail-worthy pictures the one winter Minho volunteered to be Santa Claus at the crappy local mall on Christmas eve and day because he doesn’t celebrate.
This isn’t like that.
The song’s still playing—it feels endless, hypnotic. Minho’s fingers grip his shoulders, and, wearing a look of concentration, he drops nearly his full weight onto Jisung. Drags his ass against Jisung’s hips, maddeningly slow, rolls through the full length of his torso with every movement. Jisung’s eyes wander to the soft bit of his tummy above the shorts when his spine curves inward, to the flex of his arms holding Jisung in place, to his nipples, right at Jisung’s eye level.
If he couldn’t feel the blood rushing between his ears, down to his groin, he’d think he were dreaming.
Minho’s breaths come heavier than his, if only because he’s holding them. Then one of Minho’s hands rifles gently into his hair. “Some guys like it when I pull,” he mumbles. Then he winks, laughs through a breath. “Some have nothing to pull, though.”
Jisung says nothing. His eyes are glassy and his scalp is tingling just with Minho’s touch and his dick is filling up hot under the stiff denim of his jeans no matter how he tries to empty his brain. He’s gonna know. Jisung swallows. Or he already does—
Minho picks up and turns around. He anchors his hands on Jisung’s knees, rolls his ass into the cradle of Jisung’s hips. Bends over, spreads his legs wide, plants his hands on the floor between Jisung’s feet. Jisung might whimper at that.
Minho’s heavy. Strong, controlled. Shadows pour into the contours of his thighs and back. He works Jisung over, warm and rough.
Maybe Jisung blacks out because then Minho’s sitting in his lap again. Jisung can smell the club on his skin, and underneath, the scent familiar from all the clothes Jisung’s ever stolen from him, as he leans close to bring his mouth to Jisung’s ear. “Sometimes,” Minho whispers, fingers catching in the collar of Jisung’s shirt, then trailing down his sternum, “if I can tell I’ll get tipped big, I’ll go ahead and…”
Jisung’s abs jump under his fingertips as Minho’s fingers hover there, waiting. Can I? they seem to ask, and Jisung looks into Minho’s eyes, waiting himself. Then Minho’s cupping his package through his jeans, squeezing, rolling his palm down. Jisung gasps aloud when he can’t take it, screws his eyes shut, mortified and aroused. His hands are so sweaty under his legs that they slip on the pleather of the couch.
Minho exhales shallow against his ear. “You’re so hard,” he breathes, tone indecipherable in its quietness. It has Jisung’s face overheating. Minho’s fingers are nimble as they map out the shape of his cock through the thick denim.
“Sorry,” Jisung grits out with a pitiful excuse for a voice. He stares past Minho’s shoulder, if only because he feels untethered from reality seeing only the backs of his eyelids. He shudders bodily. Lifts his ass from the couch to nudge up against Minho’s palm.
“You’re hard for me,” Minho says again, soft. Rubbing salt in the wound.
“S-sorry.”
“Shh.” Minho strokes his hair. His face materializes before Jisung’s, unavoidable. Jisung doesn’t dare to read him any deeper than the dark, harmonious shapes of his features. “You can touch me.”
Jisung’s still sitting on his hands. His gaze rests in the hollow of Minho’s clavicle. “What about the rules…”
Minho’s hand eases up on his crotch. He’s rocking slowly into Jisung again. “I trust you,” Minho says, stroking the back of Jisung’s neck.
Jisung does nothing. I touch you. You don’t touch me. “Is this part of the routine,” he whispers.
Minho’s lips quirk. Jisung thinks he might shake his head. “I trust you.” He thumbs right over the hammering pulse in Jisung’s neck. “Want you to.”
Jisung tips his heavy head against the wall. He’s frozen, his trapped cock dripping precum into his boxers. He closes his eyes again, because he’s weak.
Then he feels weightless. It’s because Minho’s standing. “Your hour’s up.”
The music fills the silence between them, but it makes Jisung panic that Minho looks to be heading over to turn it off. That must be what gets him to his feet—the sheer fear of sitting in silence with Minho after he’d worked him into a state like this. Blood streams back into his hands with pins and needles.
Jisung clears his throat. Minho’s back is turned. He fingers the cash in his pocket, drags the frayed bills out. “Do you have much longer left?”
Minho glances at the clock. Ah, the clock—there’s one on the wall. Jisung hadn’t noticed. “It’s only one,” murmurs Minho, and scrolls on the iPod to some generic bassy tune. “Couple more hours, at least.”
Jisung nods.
Minho turns. Sees him standing there like a kid ready to hand lunch money over to his bully. “Ah, Jisungie.” His face twists through a number of emotions Jisung can’t name, but then he comes close, takes the cash, tucks it back into Jisung’s jeans pocket. “It’s five hundred an hour for me,” he tells him, brows lifting, “Club takes a cut, of course. Then it’s three hundred for the bar tab.”
Jisung’s mind turns to static. He only ordered a beer. “Bar tab?”
Minho’s lips press together tight as he laughs out his nose. Pinches Jisung on the cheek. “It’s like a house fee. If you want me, you gotta buy a bottle.” He shrugs, strokes the burning part of Jisung’s cheek he’d tugged. “It’s a scam, though. The champagne’s not worth nearly that much.”
When Jisung can only watch him, cheeks pink, Minho tilts his head to the side, takes Jisung’s hand. “I’ll take care of it.”
Jisung frowns. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’ll take care of it.” Minho widens his eyes and bats them. “Okay?”
“Are you gonna be in trouble?”
Minho chuckles, eyes crinkled. “No, Jisungie.” His fingers tickle along the inside of Jisung’s palm, setting every nerve alight, and then he’s gathering Jisung into his arms. “Thanks for coming to see me,” he mumbles, chin on Jisung’s shoulder. “I’m really happy you did.”
Jisung’s still despairingly hard, but Minho already knew that. Must be why he’s squeezing him so tight it almost hurts, so tight it’s difficult to breathe. Jisung nods vaguely, settles his hands on Minho’s bare, warm back. He feels useless, flustered. He’d come here to make Minho’s night better, instead had wasted his time on the clock, possibly torn a rift in the well-loved fabric of their friendship. Fallen into whatever convoluted trap Minho had set for him.
Minho crushes him to the bone down to the last second that he withdraws. “I love you,” he says lightly, a little smile playing on his lips.
Jisung rolls his eyes away, abashed. “Is this ‘cos I got—”
“Say it back.”
Jisung looks at him. He looks devious, in the sweetest of ways, but Jisung can’t find it in himself to smile back. “I love you, too.”
Minho nods, like he deems it satisfactory. Circles Jisung to pat him on the ass, hold the curtains open. “Now get out of here. You stick out like a sore thumb.”
Minho wasn’t out in high school.
“You know people are gonna thinking we’re dating,” said Minho. He was tying Jisung’s bow tie, which he’d insisted Jisung wear in lieu of a regular tie.
“Why?” Jisung watched Minho’s eyes. He didn’t know why he asked—he’d thought about it himself, too, admittedly, though everyone knew Yeji and everyone liked Yeji and thus everyone knew she was cuffed.
Minho snorted, stepping back and turning Jisung by his shoulders to face the full-length mirror. Jisung looked nice, he thought, cleaned up alright—if only because his reflection looked so happy seeing Minho with his chin perched on his shoulder. “Either you go with a girl or you go stag with your friends,” murmured Minho. “You don’t take your friend as your actual prom date.”
“Why not?”
Minho scoffed out a laugh. “‘Cos people’ll think you’re gay.”
“But you are gay.”
“Mm.”
Jisung turned to face him. “So you still are? You haven’t changed your mind?”
Minho looked puzzled. “It’s not… something I can change my mind about? Are you fucking with me?”
“No, just checking.” Jisung fiddled with the cuffs of his suit jacket. “You never talk about who you like. Feels like it’s always just me never shutting up about Yeji.”
Minho hummed. “Yeah,” he agreed too easily, which made Jisung frown deep, though Minho was grinning. “But I’m used to it now.”
Jisung stuck out his lower lip. Minho nudged past him to go tie his own tie in the mirror. Jisung clung to him from behind, and Minho let out a wheeze when he squeezed him real tight.
“Anyway, I win,” rasped Minho, smacking at Jisung’s hands until he loosened his grip. “I have the cheapest ass date.”
Jisung tucked a smile into Minho’s shoulder. “You could’ve at least gotten me a boutonniere.”
“You didn’t even know what that was ’til I told you.”
Jisung sucked in a breath, voice dramatically choked up. “Why do you only want me for my body, Minho? What about my heart and mind and soul?”
Minho messed with his hair until a strand of it fell a little too perfectly over his forehead. Then he reached backward to squeeze Jisung’s waist. “I’ll buy you a chili cheese dog after.”
Jisung eased off him, false tears dried. “Make it two.”
.:♡:.
“Stop flinching,” Yeji hissed, shoving her brush back into the pot of black cream eyeshadow.
Minho ignored Yeji to glare at Jisung over her shoulder. “You realize this is a privilege, right? That it’s only cast and crew allowed back here and you’re neither?”
Jisung gaped. He was sprawled on the floor of the greenroom, looking on as Yeji did Minho’s stage makeup. “I didn’t even do anything!”
“You’re looking at me weird.”
“‘Cos you look like my next girlfriend.”
In sync, Minho and Yeji made quite literally the same face at him, somewhere on the spectrum between exasperation and ire. It was Jisung’s fault for poking the bear, anyway. Tensions were always high before shows.
Kids and their chaperones milled about, stepping over Jisung’s prone form. The small theater had two greenrooms, and everyone below eighteen was stuffed into one. It made for… well, chaos, when thirty kids needed their cheeks rouged like toy soldiers or polichinelles—Jisung could manage that despite his base skills, given a face paint stick—or wings fastened to their backs.
“Sung, can you just…” Yeji sighed, turned to finish the wing on Minho’s eyeliner. She had a giant white bow on her head and a flouncy dress that skimmed her knees. “Go back to your seat? Curtain’s up in like ten minutes.” She glanced at the ancient monitor up in the corner of the greenroom that displayed a crusty 240p view of the stage. “I think they’re starting the overture.”
Jisung sighed, hauled himself to his feet. “Yeah, yeah. Kiss for shit luck?” He leaned around the back of her chair, puckered up his lips noisily.
Yeji suppressed a smile. “That’s not how merde works.” But she gave in and pecked him on the lips.
“Really?” Jisung circled her chair, grabbed onto the back of Minho’s and proffered his fishy lips again. “Kiss for shit luck?”
Minho smashed the crumpled paper takeout bag from the lunch Jisung had brought him right into Jisung’s pursed mouth. “Throw this out for me?”
Jisung snatched the bag, straightening huffily and scrubbing paper bag fibers from his lips. “And you call yourself a prince.”
Minho cheesed wide for him, eyes squinching up. It was pretty cute.
“You’re not cute,” said Jisung, who then stumbled when Yeji shoved at his hip.
“Sung, go.”
“If you need me I’ll be in center front orchestra.”
“Don’t worry, won’t need you,” sang Minho, eyes shut and brows lifted as he tipped his chin up for Yeji.
“Your Nutcracker prince, everyone!” Jisung bellowed as he bowed his way out the doors.
.:♡:.
The first time Minho blacked out drinking, he was all the way down in Wildwood for senior weekend.
Without Jisung, obviously, who was just a lowly sophomore.
Minho Facetimed him from the boardwalk just past one in the morning. Jisung had fallen asleep watching a movie in Yeji’s basement and jolted awake at Minho’s call. Sensing an emergency, he’d hurriedly tossed a blanket over her sleeping form and snuck out into the backyard, padded sock-footed through the dewy grass to go sit in the weathered, rotting hammock and get eaten alive by mosquitos. There were lightning bugs floating about the lawn, so many of them, glowing and dimming and glowing and dimming, but the motion-sensing light out back flickered on and dulled their brilliance.
“Jisungie?” Minho shouted, hoarse through his poor connection. The screen was black, like he was covering the camera.
“Can’t see you, jerk-off,” Jisung chuckled, and then Minho’s face appeared, still barely visible and backlit by a bright pizzeria sign.
“Huh,” mused Minho. “Thought I—called you.”
Jisung grinned. “You did.”
“I mean... sound-call.” Minho gazed intently at the camera, a deep line in his smooth forehead. “Where’re you?”
“Yeji’s yard.”
“Oh.” Shuffling, camera-spinning. Then Minho dropped onto a bench, face aglow in red, likely from the pizzeria sign. “D’I wake you?” He smiled, loose-lipped with his head cocked. “Look all cute and puffy.”
Jisung huffed a soft laugh. “Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Why?” Jisung scoffed smilingly. “Don’t be.”
“Miss you.” Minho blinked heavily, and his eyelids didn’t move in tandem. Slurred, “Hate that you’re not here, ‘cos… I’ve got, like. Three months left with you. Then ‘m gone.”
Jisung laid back in the hammock, even if it felt like an open invitation for a spider to crawl inside his shirt. “Not forever.”
“Yes forever.” Minho sighed, and his hold on the camera got shaky. “Miss you, fuck. Wait, god.” Then he disappeared from the frame, camera pointed toward the starry sky as he retched somewhere beyond.
Jisung cackled, startled. “Dude?”
“Mm.” It was a good minute before Minho pointed the camera at his face again, wiping at his mouth and grimacing.
“You just blow chunks on the boardwalk?” Jisung’s laugh was shrill and shaky. “You should get back to—where are you staying? Some shit motel? Can you text Elly? Or I can do it.”
Minho’s throat bobbed. He stared into space a while. “Think ‘m gonna have sex with Juyeon.”
Any and all of Jisung’s trains of thought collided in a tragic accident. “What?” He blinked at the screen. “I thought you said—”
“I know, I said—thought he was… thought he was joking when he asked me to prom or had, like, ult… ulterior… whatever, like he was gonna, like. Humiliate me.” Minho licked his lip. It was shiny with spit in the shitty light. “But I actually… think he’s actually, you know. Trying to fuck me.” He smiled a bit, eyes down toward his lap.
Jisung could only watch the screen, tongue-tied.
“He Facebook messaged me to go to his room.” Minho snorted, rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Should I do it?”
“Um…”
“Maybe I should’ve gone with him.” Minho coughed to clear his throat. “To prom.”
Jisung felt… nonsensically hurt. “Then you wouldn’t have gone with me.”
Minho turned on the bench so he was backlit again. Jisung imagined him facing the dark ocean. “Our pictures were funny,” Minho admitted, smile crooked.
It was humid and at least eighty degrees even in the night, but Jisung still felt it when some warmth returned to his chest. “Yeah. I’ll show them to my grandkids.”
“You and Yeji’s grandkids. Jisung and Yeji, sitting in a tree.” Minho rolled his eyes. “Hm. Was funny. When…” He laughed, sharp, cutting through the crickets in the night. “When you tried to do the worm. On the dance floor. God, you’re… so dumb.”
“Hey.” Jisung grinned. “A valiant attempt was made.”
“You sucked. Indisp…utably.” Minho smiled and hiccuped, eyes cast elsewhere. “Mm, yeah. Wish you were here.”
“Are you gonna be okay?” With some struggle, Jisung sat upright in the hammock. “I can text Elly to find you, what’s the name of—”
But something on Minho’s screen had caught his attention, a white-lit notification that shone in his dark irises as it rolled by. “I gotta go, Jisungie,” he interrupted. “Love you.” He laughed, oddly acerbic.
“Text me in the morning,” said Jisung, but Minho hung up before he could get the full ask out.
“I was just gonna let you do your thing when I saw you, but you looked so fucking awkward over here I had to come over and tell you myself.”
That’s Hyunjin.
Jisung can’t really blame him. He hadn’t come to Frost with the intention of staying—though he had dropped the cash just to get in—nor had he dressed for the occasion.
He spares a downward glance at his ratty hoodie, joggers tucked into tightly-laced, ice-crusted boots.
Meanwhile, Hyunjin’s long legs are wrapped in fishnet tights; his lips are full and stained matte red and he’s cinched at his middle by a latex corset vest.
Yeah. No blame whatsoever.
“I’m shocked they even let you inside,” Hyunjin muses aloud, tapping a pensive fingertip at his mouth.
“Think you’ve made your point.”
“People are staring.”
Jisung gives him a funny look. “Are you sure they’re not staring at you?”
Hyunjin’s eyes narrow. “It’s very possible.” He cocks his head. “Are you gonna tell me why you’re here, trying to make some kind of distressed-knockoff-college-loungewear statement?” He nods at Jisung’s hands. “With a giant golf umbrella, no less?”
Jisung self-consciously tucks the umbrella between himself and the wall. It’s Changbin’s, VirtuoSeo-branded, one he’d lent Jisung weeks ago on his way out of a late, rainy night in studio three. “It’s sleeting.” He glances about. Minho’s nowhere in sight. Must be in a back room.
Hyunjin takes pause. “Are you really making small talk about the weather?”
Jisung blinks, head jerking toward Hyunjin. “What?”
Hyunjin squints. “You’re so spacey. Why are you here?”
“It’s sleeting,” Jisung repeats, earnest. “Like… it’s really coming down out there, like fucking pelting, and it’s gonna keep going ’til morning, and it’s more than a ten minute walk to the subway from here and when Minho left home he was only wearing a sweater, so…” His fist clenches around the umbrella handle. It’s December. Not below freezing enough for snow, but cold enough to be chilled to the bone if drenched like a wet dog.
Hyunjin listens. Then he clears his throat, leans his hip into the wall, and flexes his hand at Jisung, palm toward the floor. “So, let me get this straight, you… you don’t have anything better to do than to worry about whether Minho gets caught in the rain or not?” Jisung doesn’t answer, but Hyunjin seems to assess him anyhow. He hums, fascinated. “Oh, wow. You really don’t.”
Jisung snorts. Maybe this was a bad idea.
“I can take the umbrella back to the dressing room, if that’s what you want,” says Hyunjin. “But, like, you didn’t think this through, Jisung. Where’s your raincoat?”
“Raincoat?” Jisung’s brows furrow. “Who the fuck owns a raincoat?”
Hyunjin’s furrow deeper. “I do. It’s Issey Miyake. My old sugar daddy bought it for me.”
Jisung stares.
Hyunjin stares back.
“I don’t have a raincoat,” Jisung grits.
“Give me your phone.”
Jisung obeys, unlocks it and hands it over before he’s even asked, “Why?”
The screen illuminates Hyunjin’s face in white. The mole under his left eye is stark and black, like he’s gone over it with eyeliner. He types for a bit, locks it, returns it to Jisung. “There’s a twenty-four hour pub on the corner. I’ll text you when Minho’s getting ready to leave.” Hyunjin looks to smile faintly, but it’s too dark, the neon lighting too inconsistent, for Jisung to truly tell.
Jisung checks the time on his phone—12:31am. Pulls his lower lip into his mouth.
“Get some coffee.” Hyunjin pats him on the shoulder, squeezes, then breezes past.
Jisung slides his half-empty mug from hand to hand along the waxy surface of the table, pictures his thoughts asail on the tempestuous, lukewarm coffee. His left hand catches the mug too abruptly, and the coffee splashes over the mug’s edge, dapples the table.
He sets a napkin atop. Watches the brown seep in.
It’s his third cup. Decaf, though, after the second. Otherwise his hands would start shaking.
He’s not alone in the pub, but it feels like he is. There’s a raggedy old man at the bar, two girls sat at a table near the door who look like they’re trying to wait out the rain. The glass lampshades on all the pendant lights are green, casting the yellowed light in even murkier tones over the dark wood walls, the faded red booths.
Did I go too far?
That’s what Minho had asked, the night—morning—he’d come home from the club, after Jisung had paid him a visit.
Jisung hadn’t been awake until the sound of the door had roused him. He’d passed out rather quick, actually, after he’d gotten a hand on himself in the shower.
He disgusted himself. A bit.
Minho knelt on the bed, still in his outdoor clothes. Concerned. “Did I go too far?”
Jisung sat up. “No.”
“I shouldn’t have…”
“You’re fine.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“You’re fine.”
Minho watched him, swallowed. “Are you?”
Jisung hadn’t been fine before, wasn’t any better or worse after. “Yeah. Always.”
He feels it under his chin when his phone vibrates on the tabletop.
hyunjin <3
10 mins
jisung
ok
thanks :)
Jisung flags down the waitress, pays his bill. The rain’s been such a steady beat on the street outside that he’d grown numb to it, but it’s still pouring.
A blustering gale of wind blows up under his loose hoodie as he steps outside, and he tugs at the hood strings to scrunch the hood up protectively against his neck. He waits outside Frost, far away enough to not be able to look the bouncer in the eye, to have the protection of the neighboring building’s awning.
When Minho steps out, he’s holding his bag over his head. His sweater is thin and short enough that it rides up, and Jisung wants to cover that bit of his stomach with warming hands.
Minho’s on autopilot, though, and is about to make a break for it when Jisung catches him around the arm.
“Oh,” breathes Minho. His face is clean but there’s a smudge of black at the outer corner of his eye, a faded, clean line like he’d thumbed that path with a makeup wipe. He has to drop his bag to fit under Jisung’s umbrella, but Jisung takes it from him before it can hit the ground.
Minho’s still dumbfounded, bunny teeth and parted mouth and all, but at least Jisung can keep him dry. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Minho says, finally. “It’s so late.”
The rain hammers against the umbrella, angry patters echoing under its cocoon. “Um.” Weirdly, it was easier to explain to Hyunjin. “It’s sleeting.”
Minho blinks, brow crumpled. He looks cold, hugging at his elbows like that. Jisung lifts the strap of Minho’s bag over his head, frees up his hand to gather him in. “We should go,” mumbles Jisung.
The walk to the subway is brisk. Their pants are soaked to the calves and Jisung thinks his boot’s sprung a leak, his sock unpleasantly damp, but at least it feels toastier underground. Their train is prompt, empty enough that they can find two adjacent seats. Jisung settles Minho’s bag over his lap. It’s a bit wet, seeps cold to his skin through his sweatpants.
Minho looks tired, zoned out on the darkness beyond the window opposite, or on their reflection. Jisung watches his profile for the full duration to the next stop, when Minho meets his eyes, gives him a ghost of a smile. Lays his cheek to Jisung’s shoulder.
With his own against Minho’s hair, Jisung has to fight against the drooping of his eyelids as the rumble of the subway threatens to put him to sleep like a goddamn baby. It’s Minho, though, who pats him on the thigh when the time comes, steadies Jisung by his waist when he stands before the train’s fully stopped.
Jisung still has Minho’s bag across his body, Changbin’s umbrella held between them, as they emerge from the subway station. He loses Minho suddenly, though, whips around both ways before he realizes he’s materialized at Jisung’s other side, taken Jisung’s dangling hand in his own.
Jisung holds the umbrella across his body to make sure Minho isn’t rained on. It’s loud enough outside that he can’t hear his pulse between his ears, but rather can feel its lurching in his neck, his chest. When Minho threads his fingers between Jisung’s, crowds in close with his other hand over Jisung’s bicep, it only gets worse.
He can feel Minho watching him, too. Jisung keeps his eyes trained ahead like it’s his duty to navigate, though they’re two blocks from home and Minho could probably do it in a blizzard with his eyes closed.
Jisung’s wet boots squeak on the stairs up to Minho’s apartment. Minho tries to take his bag back, but Jisung gives him the don’t cross me squint.
It’s dark in the foyer as they step out of their shoes. Blessedly warm, though; Seungmin hadn’t cranked down the heat before he’d gone to bed.
“Did you lock the door?” mumbles Minho.
“Huh? Oh.” Jisung turns to do so, slides both bolts into place.
Minho has his sleeves bunched over his hands. “You didn’t have to.”
You just told me to, Jisung thinks, before he gets it. He leaves Changbin’s umbrella leaned against the corner, shrugs out from under Minho’s bag. His chest is tight, has been from the moment he sat down at the pub with his bitter coffee, and he wants to tell Minho he ought to change out of his damp clothes, yet all he does is watch him, inept with his heart in his throat.
Minho takes a breath, and it fills up the cramped foyer, the hollow of Jisung’s chest. In his damp socks, he pads the couple steps between them, reaches for Minho’s waist to anchor himself. His hand trembles so he can barely get a hold, sweater slipping in his grip.
Minho is balanced, perfectly still. He always has been—controlled, graceful, solid. The reason Jisung had skinned his knees a few hundred times less during his growth spurts.
He tries to be uncharacteristically careful about this, though. This—feeling his toes bump Minho’s as he bridges the distance between them, breathes deep out his nose, lays a gentle kiss to Minho’s slack mouth.
Maybe it’s the wet clothes on his back and the heat pumping out of the radiator. Or maybe it’s Minho who makes him feel like he’d sat in the summer shade for years, goosebumps prickling his skin until the sunlight hit and white-hot heat seeped in where it was already warm.
Minho swallows audibly. Then he grasps Jisung’s cheeks in a familiar gesture and draws him back in.
They stumble. Minho’s back hits the dresser that doesn’t quite fit in the foyer in the first place, and Jisung’s arm encircles him. Jisung tries to grab onto the dresser’s edge but misses and whacks the ceramic plate filled with loose change and Seungmin’s keys.
“Fuck,” he mutters, and his lips brush Minho’s as he says it. Minho chuckles into the air between them though there’s not much of it, holds their foreheads together as Jisung grapples for a proper hold on the lip of the dresser. And only because Minho’s holding him like this does Jisung feel brave enough to kiss him again.
Minho opens for him, strokes thumbs around Jisung’s jaw, behind his ears. His back arches over Jisung’s forearm, and their tops are clingy between them, not quite body temperature yet. Too cold, too much.
Jisung parts their lips. “My hands’re shaking,” he breathes, and he holds one up between them, impossible to see in the dark. Minho takes it, squeezes. Jisung’s lips land on his cheekbone before he can realize Minho’s head is tilted, and he laughs timidly, tips his forehead to Minho’s shoulder.
“C’mere,” whispers Minho. He hugs Jisung’s shoulders, small hands smoothing over them. Then Jisung feels Minho’s lips kiss upward from the base of his neck and he loses his breath.
Minho tongues over his earlobe, presses his mouth into the hollow under Jisung’s cheekbone. Bends at the knees to get below Jisung and connect their lips again with the softest pleading noise.
And Jisung is only so strong.
When Minho licks at the seam of his lips, Jisung lets him in, fingers flexing on Minho’s back. It’s far too easy to kiss him when Jisung’s only ever kissed one other, but maybe it’s just Minho, maybe he’s just this good, this sweet, this eager. Like he wants Jisung back.
The dresser thuds against the wall with their weight and Minho’s cradling both his cheeks as he sucks on Jisung’s tongue. It must be a mutual thought—more—when Jisung tips his chin up to keep their mouths together as he reaches for the backs of Minho’s thighs, as Minho locks one arm across Jisung’s shoulders, the other on the dresser behind.
But then it’s Minho who swats the key dish and the dresser slides an inch across the wall and nudges Changbin’s umbrella, sending it clattering against the floor, and it’s Minho who gigglingly hisses shhh as he begs out of Jisung’s grip, drags him by the hand to the bedroom.
Minho seals the door shut behind them. Locks it. Jisung idles by the pole, leaving fingerprints on its metal surface. He doesn’t expect Minho to turn, lean against his door, then decide against it and tug his sweater over his head.
Jisung swallows. Minho comes to him, tentative, and Jisung eyes the bare slopes of his shoulders, the thick muscle of his arms. The drapes are open to the night, and there’s a beam of streetlight that cuts right over Minho’s face, centered on that little freckle on his nose. It’s weird, thinking about all the parts of Minho he’s touched but never recognized the way he is now when he feels he needs him.
Minho thumbs the hem of Jisung’s hoodie. “Up,” he tells him, and like always, Jisung listens without a second thought. Minho drags it over his head and raised arms, drops it to the floor. Smiles and strokes Jisung’s hair affectionately from his face when his bangs flop into his eyes, in desperate need of a trim.
“This is different,” whispers Jisung. He’s close enough to feel Minho’s warmth on his skin though they’re not touching.
Minho lets his arm go lank at his side. “Different good or different bad?”
Jisung blinks. “I don’t think it’s different bad.”
“No?” Minho gives him a crooked, humorous little smile. “Could be, though?”
“Maybe.” Jisung cracks a smile, too. “Dunno yet.” He’s only looking at Minho’s lips now.
“You regret kissing me?” whispers Minho, and it makes Jisung’s brain whir and spark white, seeing his mouth form those words. Kiss. Me.
Numbly, Jisung shakes his head.
Minho gives him another peek of teeth. “No?”
Again, Jisung shakes his head. He leans into Minho’s space, nudges their lips together again. Minho’s hands find his waist.
His sweatpants are still clinging wetly to his calves, but Minho doesn’t call him out for being overeager as he shoves down the waistband and rolls them down. Just watches Jisung with those eyes that seem to consume the dark, holds onto Jisung when he goes to take Minho’s off for him too.
Minho steps out of his sweats, and his mouth is on Jisung’s neck, nibbling. He hums softly as Jisung’s palms smooth over his ass, rucking up his briefs in the back, and steps in until their bodies are aligned. Minho’s chest is warm against Jisung’s, and the head of Jisung’s cock nudges Minho’s hipbone through the fabric of his boxers, leaves his breath stuck in his throat.
Minho licks a stripe over his neck, comes to eye-level, chuckles as their noses touch. “Your hands,” Minho tells him in a whisper, and Jisung nods quickly. They’re still tangibly trembling against Minho’s back.
“I know.” He smiles sheepishly, only wider when Minho’s soft laugh tickles his lips.
“Why’re you nervous, Jisungie,” mumbles Minho, arms twining around Jisung’s neck.
Jisung looks back and forth between Minho’s eyes. “Aren’t you?”
Minho nods, faint. “Yeah.”
He’s a blur in Jisung’s vision. Their foreheads touch and Jisung won’t let them separate. “Am I scary?”
“You’re so scary,” Minho deadpans, and Jisung laughs, squeezes the skin at his middle.
“You’re scary, too.” Jisung kisses him, gentle and wet enough that their lips smack when they part.
“Hm. Thanks.”
“I knew you’d take it as a compliment.” Jisung whispers it against his lips, feels lightheaded with the pulses of heat shooting up his spine whenever Minho so much as sways against him.
“You know me so well.” A flash of teeth, and then Minho’s tongue pleads back into his mouth. Jisung loses himself in it, in Minho’s soft breaths, in the way he rises onto his tiptoes to kiss Jisung from above, the silvery little sound he makes when Jisung sucks hard at his bottom lip. “Jisungie.”
Jisung draws back, lips skimming Minho’s cheek to go kiss him by his ear. “Yeah, baby?”
Minho pants out a laugh, arches against him, and—yeah, that’s the heat of his cock rubbing Jisung’s lower belly, yeah. “Baby?”
Jisung falters, lucky all he can see is the shadows of Minho’s hair. “Is that—okay?”
Minho tucks his face against Jisung’s shoulder. Jisung feels the pointy tip of his nose brush his skin. “S’different,” Minho tells him, smug. Wry.
Now they’re just standing there. In one another’s arms. Jisung’s not sure how much longer he can do it—it’s a wonder his legs have held up this long. “Different—”
“Good,” Minho finishes for him. Then he pushes away from Jisung, backtracks toward the bed. Sits down.
The mattress on top—Jisung’s—has slipped a few inches over one edge, dangles off in the gap between the bed and the wall. Minho crawls backward, settles against the pillows, knees bent and spread. “Jisungie.” He smiles, coy. “Don’t you want to come down here and have your way with me?”
Jisung chokes—on spit, probably. He’s crawling onto the bed as soon as he can get his limbs to work, but then he’s also spewing some dumb shit like, “Aren’t you tired?”
“Yes,” Minho tells him. Jisung’s on all fours above him, and it feels… weird. But when Minho’s hands skim appreciatively up his arms, it feels really, really good. “But I want you to touch me.”
Jisung blinks, eyelids aflutter. “O-okay.”
Minho has a gentle hold on his face again. “You want to?”
“So bad,” breathes Jisung.
Minho nods. Thumbs his cheek. “You nervous?”
“As fuck,” Jisung confirms.
Minho’s lips quirk, adorably uneven. “Me too. Can I take off your boxers?”
Jisung glances between them to check that they’re indeed still in place. “Yes please.”
Minho grins, drags Jisung’s boxers off. The waistband catches on the head of his erection, and Jisung fumbles to help Minho get them down his knees.
“You want me?” Minho asks him, near-silent. His fingertips skim the tender skin of Jisung’s ass, just down his cheek.
“Yeah, baby, it’s like,” starts Jisung, then swallows. “It’s like when I saw Jurassic Park for the first time and it was so scary I cried and had to stop but I still secretly really wanted to finish.” He nods. “That’s how sexy—I mean, scary. How scary you are.”
Minho’s eyes narrow.
“Don’t make that face,” begs Jisung. “You already knew how lame I was before you asked to take off my underwear.”
Minho’s face warms with a smile, like he can’t help it. “I didn’t know you cried at Jurassic Park.”
“I was six.”
“I assume you haven’t watched it since.”
“Maybe so.”
Minho hums. Grabs a handful of Jisung’s ass. “Love that you’re… so in touch with your emotions.”
Jisung stifles a cackle into Minho’s shoulder. While he’s down there—god, yeah, Minho smells good. “Can I take these off.” He snaps at the waistband of Minho’s briefs.
“Yes,” breathes Minho. He does most of the work, though, and then he’s squeezing at Jisung’s chest, pinching at his nipple, and Jisung’s between Minho’s bare legs, rutting against him like an animal. He’s leaking—onto Minho, which should be mortifying, but Minho’s ankles are hooked behind his back and he’s moaning in soft puffs against Jisung’s ear. So it’s really not.
Minho drags him up into a kiss, rakes his fingers through Jisung’s hair. He hums into Jisung’s lips, hums as he pulls back, too, swats out his arm toward the nightstand. Jisung’s heart rate spikes, and he drags his mouth over Minho’s cheek as he eyes that straying hand. “Minho…”
“Just wanna come,” Minho breathes, strained, rooting about in the nightstand drawer. His jostling has the mattress slipping precariously further off the bed.
“Minho—”
“We’ll fix it later.” Minho opens a bottle of lube, looks right into Jisung’s eyes as he wraps a slick hand around him. Jisung yelps a bit at the cold—Minho’s room is sweltering during the summer and sub-zero in the winter, apparently—and Minho kisses him apologetically, spreads his legs and guides Jisung’s cock to nestle against the cleft of his ass. “Yeah?” breathes Minho.
Jisung nods dizzily. Groans when the wet head of his cock catches against Minho’s rim. Between them, Minho has a hand on himself, tugging fast as Jisung fucks between his cheeks. “Wanna make you come, baby,” he breathes, kissing Minho’s jaw, cheek. “S’that—still okay?”
“Is what.” Minho turns his head, hazily meets his eyes.
Jisung hesitates. “Baby.”
Minho suckles on his lower lip. Even lidded, his eyes sparkle. “Yeah. Like it.” He rolls his hips against Jisung’s, biting hard where he’d just wet his lip. “Mm, c’mere.” He drags Jisung in by his ass until they’re up against each other again, wraps his hand around both of them though it goes barely halfway around and he can’t get a good grip. “You wanna fuck me, hm?” whispers Minho.
Jisung’s wobbling to hold himself up. He nods, quick but dazed.
“You want me to fuck you?” presses Minho. He’s breathing fast. “Have you ever—”
“Yeah.” Jisung swallows. “Yeah, I like it.”
Minho’s eyes are dark. His brows furrow, then smooth out. “You never told me.”
“How the fuck do you even bring up something like that,” Jisung hisses. “You’re one to talk!”
Minho wheezes a laugh. “Okay, okay. Shh.” He slows his hand, circles just Jisung’s cock, nudges his thumb right under the crown. “I’ll fuck you ’til you can’t think, hm? I’ll hold you down right here and fuck you. Bend you over in the kitchen while Seungminnie’s out, when you’re being all cute pretending to cook using the microwave. How’s that?”
Jisung’s not… expecting that. For something like that to flow so freely from Minho’s mouth. Like he’s thought about it.
“Oh, fuck,” he grits out, whimpering, spilling hot over Minho’s hand. His jaw hangs lax watching himself fuck into Minho’s clenched fist in the shadows between their bodies, dripping over Minho’s fingers and stomach.
“Goddamn,” muses Minho.
Jisung drops his forehead to Minho’s chest. He just came. All over Minho.
And Minho’s still going. “That worked like a charm.”
“Try and make it sound more premeditated, I dare you.” Jisung’s muscles feel like jelly as he lifts his head up to squint at Minho, who is, of course, smiling back. He looks sleepy around the edges and it turns Jisung’s chest to liquid like a popsicle on hot asphalt. “Ah…” He shifts to sit up between Minho’s thighs. “So… that was a lot.”
Minho bats his eyes. “Are we gonna talk about—”
Jisung doesn’t let him finish. Feelings? Not today. Pegging? Hell fucking no. He does the only thing he can think to do—touch Minho. He bites the tip of his tongue, works his hand over Minho’s cock, cups the other over his balls like he likes himself.
Minho moans, smearing lube and Jisung’s come across the sheet as he feels for a grip. “Don’t think so hard, Jisungie,” he says on an exhale, hips nudging up from the bed. “You’ll hurt your little brain.”
Jisung’s lips twitch with the effort to remain unruffled. “Brave of you to insult me when I have your dick in my hand.”
Minho chuckles as he arches his neck back, huffs a breath. “Faster.”
Jisung bites harder on his tongue. “Like that?” Minho’s cock gives a throb in his hand, and Jisung feels his mouth water, his head thrum with a pleased flush like it’s praise.
Minho grabs at Jisung’s thigh, squeezes. “Come kiss me.” His voice is ragged.
Jisung doesn’t have to be asked twice. He folds himself over Minho’s body again, readjusts his grip, hums low when Minho surges up to mould their lips together. His breath hitches when he feels Minho’s fingers rub at his entrance, goes dizzy with it, pumps arrhythmically at Minho’s cock, feels it everywhere when Minho mewls into his mouth and falls apart.
Jisung can’t quite describe it, how it feels to relax into Minho’s side, a leg thrown over his. To kiss him, unhurried and languid. To open his eyes to find Minho’s have shut heavily, to shake him gently and have Minho only groan in response, wiggle to get comfy for sleep.
“Minho,” Jisung urges, “my jizz is all over you.”
Minho sniffs, scrunches his eyes shut tighter. Jisung expects something like never thought I’d hear you say that in my life, because it’s what he’s thinking himself, but Minho only huffs, “And whose fault is that?” Jisung’s about to protest that it’s certainly Minho’s, but then Minho rises like a zombie from a grave, muttering, “Need to wash my face anyway. Wipes won’t cut it.”
Jisung hauls the mattress back into place once they’re both off. And in the bathroom… Jisung laughs the second he steps under the light. They make quite the picture in the mirror, Minho smirking down at the sink as he scrubs his hands, both with lips swollen and pink.
It’s past six when Jisung checks his phone. Still raining, too. It’s dark, but the sun will start to rise soon, so Jisung crawls across the bed to pull the curtains shut. When he turns, Minho’s curled up on what’s become Jisung’s side, eyes shut, looking rather content. Jisung blinks, amused. “Hello?”
Minho swats at the air. “Shh.”
“Something about this picture seems… off.”
“I used to sleep over here before you came around, you know,” Minho mumbles knowingly. “Then you stole my side.”
Jisung grimaces at the wet spots on the sheets Minho’s very obviously avoiding. “Squatter’s rights,” he huffs.
“Just get a towel.”
“No.” Jisung scoots close. “Turn over?”
Minho complies easier than expected.
Jisung gazes down at him, hesitant, eyes roving bare skin. “Can I…”
“Yeah,” whispers Minho, who reaches backward, locates Jisung’s wrist, and yanks him down, though it’s the wrong arm to wrap around his body, so there’s a bit of a fuss as Jisung winces at the angle and whines and Minho kicks him (on purpose) until Jisung’s settled at Minho’s back, hugging his waist.
Jisung stares into the darkness of Minho’s hair. Feels Minho’s back expand into his chest every time he breathes. He nudges his lips to the top of Minho’s spine.
“Night,” Jisung mumbles, though he really might just mouth it, because Minho says nothing, only hooks his elbow over Jisung’s arm, doesn’t quite tangle their fingers but covers Jisung’s hand with his own, leaves it safe and warm.
Jisung stirs only a few hours later at the sound of Seungmin puttering around in the kitchen—nine o’clock on Sunday morning like clockwork—but is quick to pass back out. When his eyes peel open again, likely well into the afternoon, he’s on his back, half-trapped under Minho with their legs in a tangle.
They’ve kicked the blanket to the foot of the bed and Jisung’s skin prickles with goosebumps wherever he’s not warmed by Minho, but he doesn’t dare move to fetch it.
Minho’s grumble of a voice startles him. “Are you staring at me?”
Jisung blinks at his feet, then shifts to look down at Minho, who’s got his cheek on Jisung’s shoulder, eyes still shut. “What?” Jisung laughs, hoarse and dazed. “I opened my eyes, like, two seconds ago. Gimme a bit. I’ll get there.”
Minho hums. Taps out a beat against Jisung’s chest with his fore and middle fingers. “You just seem like that kind of person.” Minho’s thighs clench around one of his—that’s when Jisung realizes he’s got a knee tucked between Minho’s legs. “Who watches people in their sleep.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Jisung narrows his eyes. “Whisper me more sweet nothings, earth angel.”
Minho laughs, soft and crisp. Cracks a bunch of joints as he stretches his legs. “I feel like… I’ve never needed a shower more in my life.”
“Bold statement,” Jisung murmurs to the ceiling. He brings some feeling back to the arm under Minho’s head, rolling out his wrist, covering Minho’s shoulder with his hand. “What about the time you peed in my laundry basket?”
“What?” Minho croaks. “I peed in the basket, not on myself.” Then he sits up on his elbow, squints accusingly down at Jisung, hilariously sleep-ruffled. “Why even bring that—”
“It’s never not funny.” Jisung grins.
Minho scowls like Grumpy Cat. Smashes his face into Jisung’s chest, squeezes him tight around the waist.
Jisung’s eyelids flutter, again toward the ceiling. They’re really cuddling—and completely naked, at that. If he thinks about it too long his hands might start to quiver again.
“So what I’m getting from this,” mumbles Minho, “is you don’t want to have sex with me.”
That nearly sends Jisung into a state of shock. “Wha—what?” His chin scrunches up trying to catch Minho’s eye.
“You’re making fun of me for that time I peed in your hamper four years ago.” Minho’s drumming against his chest again. “So. You don’t want to have sex with me.”
Jisung’s brows slant despondently. “But—I do! I want to make fun of you and have sex with you!”
Minho shushes him, vigorous, and Jisung pouts against the finger on his lips, stares wide-eyed at the bedroom door. Not a peep from beyond, not even the gentle tap tap of Gretchen’s nails on the hardwood. Then Minho drops his hand back to Jisung’s chest. “Sure you do.”
“I do,” Jisung whines, voice small.
“Do you?”
“Yeah. Yes.”
“Right now?”
“Is that an option?”
Minho licks his lips and smiles. You’re so fucking beautiful, Jisung thinks, but can’t say it. It’s too far a leap out of a comfort zone he’s spent too long getting situated in; he’d need his passport and a few planes to get there. Maybe a plastic cup of airplane wine. One of those horseshoe-shaped neck pillows.
“Is it an option,” echoes Minho, lowering his pitch to mock Jisung’s voice. Then he grips Jisung by the chin, kisses him firmly on the mouth. “I don’t know. Is it?” Minho’s knee slides further down between Jisung’s legs. He’s already sporting a semi, so—
“It can be arranged.”
Jisung’s hand gropes for the back of Minho’s thigh, hauling him in. Minho’s cock drags against his side as he does, and Minho’s leaving little nips and kisses on his chin, the corners of his lips, as he mutters, “Can you get in touch with the arrangers, ‘cos—”
“Yeah yeah yeah, yeah,” Jisung breathes and proceeds to peek down his own body, wrangle Minho’s leg off his crotch. “You ready to go?”
“Please don’t flex your dick.”
Jisung’s eyes dart to Minho’s. “How’d you know I was gonna?”
Minho pets his hair from his face. It makes Jisung’s ears flood with heat. “I can read your mind,” he whispers, conspiratorial, and rolls onto his back, lugging Jisung with him.
Minho’s thighs are firm and strong as they bracket his hips. Jisung drags his palms up the backs of them, and his chin’s wet from the silly, teasing swipes of Minho’s tongue as he dips down to mouth at his neck, collarbone. “Can I fuck you?” he mumbles, and it’s bizarrely hot how his own voice sends something zinging down his spine.
Minho exhales deep, strokes his hair. “Yeah.” Jisung could fist-pump, but then Minho adds, “Confident this morning, aren’t you?” Rethinks. “This afternoon.”
Jisung whips his head up. “Don’t jinx it!” he hisses. “Just be grateful I can speak!”
Minho lifts a brow, lazily amused, strokes at the lines of Jisung’s shoulders. “What, ‘cos I render you speechless, or something?”
Jisung frowns, lets Minho kiss him on the mouth before he leans over the bed’s edge in search of the lube he’s almost certain fell to the floor in the wee hours. “Yes,” he says firmly. When his fingertips hit the bottle, he pops back up. “Condom?”
Minho rolls onto his stomach to get one. Jisung gawks openly at the shift of his ass and thighs as he does. “Earth angel.”
Minho snorts as he rolls back over, avoiding Jisung’s eyes. “Am I supposed to answer to that?”
“Baby,” amends Jisung, still in a trance. “Promise me you’ll sit on my face someday?”
That gets Minho to look at him, at least. “Okay,” he says, taken aback. Then he coaxes Jisung between his legs again, kisses him warm. “Promise.”
Jisung nods, nails digging into the sheets, but Minho’s hands are on his neck, resisting when he tries to pull away.
“Jisung,” mumbles Minho. “I’m just me. And you’re just you. Don’t…” He runs his hand up into the back of Jisung’s hair, raking gently, and kisses over his bottom lip. “Don’t worry.”
“Mkay,” hums Jisung, and maybe it’s just the warm-fuzzies rushing to his head, or maybe it’s not actually the worst that Minho’s… seen him at his worst. At every time that’s ever mattered, really.
Having his fingers inside Minho, with Minho’s hips canted on the pillow like that, his head cocked and his eyes dark and molten on Jisung’s when he’s not tipping his head back and moaning with his pretty lips parted, Jisung has a hard time believing it’ll feel even better when he’s inside. And it’s new, that feeling of gently stroking over Minho’s prostate, drawing out of him the sweetest sounds, and something burns in Jisung’s chest and the pit of his stomach watching Minho’s cock dribble over his belly as he works his fingers. He almost asks to lick it clean, but then Minho’s pleading for him, sitting up to put the condom on Jisung himself. Some other time—though Jisung might be collecting more somedays than he deserves yet.
“Don’t start shaking now,” murmurs Minho, just as Jisung’s looming over him, nudging up against his hole. His heels nudge at Jisung’s back, and as Jisung breathes out an incredulous laugh, Minho smiles and adds, “I’m not Godzilla. Just me, Jisungie.”
Jisung’s teeth clamp down on his lower lip, grunting as he presses in, as Minho’s heat swallows him. “Godzilla wasn’t in Jurassic Park,” he breathes, strained, and then, “fuck—fuck.”
“What?” rasps Minho as Jisung sinks in until Minho’s ass is flush to his hips.
“I don’t know.”
Minho peers up at him. Giggles. “Oh, glad we’re on the same page.”
“Same page, yeah,” agrees Jisung, “Can I—”
Minho clenches tight around his cock, like he’s trying to hold him in, and exhales, “Any day now.”
“Watch your attitude,” grumbles Jisung, fighting a silly smile as he tips his face down toward Minho’s neck, pulls out, fucks back in slow. Minho curls around him, melds into him, takes him beautifully.
“Just trying to calm you down,” Minho whispers close to his ear. He fits his palms against the tensing muscles in Jisung’s back, digs his nails in, keens something dulcet. “Actually… think it’s working.”
Jisung kisses up Minho’s neck to his jaw, the drag of his hips slow and hot. He feels Minho flutter around him, hears his breath stutter in tandem. “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?”
Minho laughs, soft, barely above a breath. “No.” He strokes Jisung’s hair. “Just know you.” He tips his head toward Jisung’s until their noses brush, kisses him almost… timidly.
“You okay?” Jisung mumbles between their lips, dipping his tongue into Minho’s mouth, dragging Minho’s lip away from his teeth.
Minho’s eyes crack open, and then they’re looking at each other, close enough for everything to blur. Minho hums, trails fingers over Jisung’s mouth. “Yeah.” He blinks, unhurried, and his slow, toothy smile oozes like hot molasses into Jisung’s veins. “You feel good.”
Jisung flushes. There’s something about how Minho’s looking unmistakably at him, only him. “You, too,” he manages.
Minho moans softly—Jisung sees the tension of it roll through his throat. “Harder, baby.” His knuckles graze Jisung’s cheek. “Please.”
Minho starts up a litany of soft cries as Jisung picks up the pace, synchronous with the lewd slap of skin on skin. Still, it’s Minho with his lidded eyes on Jisung’s face and his wavering voice who says, “You’re so gorgeous, aren’t you?” Cards his fingers through Jisung’s hair. “You are. Always.”
And Jisung can’t form a single word. He grinds deep into Minho, traces his palm down Minho’s sweat-damp torso to wrap his fingers around his cock. Minho grips at his shoulders, squirming to roll his body down onto Jisung, into his hand. Jisung kisses the sweat from his upper lip when he can’t resist.
“Gonna come in me?” whispers Minho as their lips part. “Want you to—want you to fill me up, yeah?”
Jisung swears, lips brushing Minho’s chin, nods in a daze. “Yeah—close,” he utters.
Minho’s legs tighten around him. “Hard—” Jisung cuts him off with the snap of his hips, and Minho’s brow scrunches and something like ecstasy courses through Jisung’s body, seeing that painted across Minho’s face.
When Jisung chokes, “Minho, baby,” breathes hot and wet against Minho’s neck, Minho holds him in—locks his legs in place, gets a hand on Jisung’s ass until Jisung fills the condom, until they feel inseparable, until Jisung feels Minho’s release sticky between his fingers.
For a while, Minho simply doesn’t let go, even when Jisung lets his bodyweight go heavy against him. He cradles Jisung’s head to his neck, smooths a hand between his shoulders until Jisung’s soft inside him.
When enough of Jisung’s wits return to him, he recognizes the shallowness of Minho’s breaths. “Sorry,” he blurts, pushing up and tearing out of Minho’s arms.
“It’s okay,” Minho murmurs fondly, pinching at Jisung’s tricep. “You’re heavier than you used to be.”
Jisung half-smiles as he grips the condom to the base of his cock, eases out of Minho. Gets distracted tying it when he can’t help but thumb over Minho’s hole, wet and abused.
Minho flinches, whispers, “Pervert,” while he grins at Jisung with his hands behind his head.
“Yeah.” Jisung totes the condom to the bathroom trash, returns to collapse back onto the sheets beside Minho. “Good night.”
Minho’s voice sounds comfortingly close from behind his closed eyelids. “Could use a couple more hours, I guess.”
“Hours. Days, even. Months.”
Minho huffs a laugh. “Mkay. See you next year, Jisungie.”
They pass out until three. That’s when Minho rattles Jisung awake, grumbling that he’s hungry, and gets in the shower.
There’s a smear of melted chocolate at the corner of Minho’s mouth.
He’s going to town on a stack of chocolate chip pancakes opposite Jisung in a booth at The Snack Bar diner. They were Jisung’s pancakes, actually, until they’d arrived at the table and Minho had decided he preferred them to his omelet.
Jaehyun isn’t on shift and Sunwoo at the front, of course, never had the faintest idea what Jisung’s target once upon that night several months ago looked like. He’d grinningly ushered Jisung’s party of two to a table, though, like they were old pals. It’s busier on a Sunday afternoon, Jisung thinks, than he can ever see it being on the night shift.
“You have, um.” Jisung casts a glance about them, at the crowded tables, at Minho with his hood pulled over his shower-damp hair, still looking a bit groggy. Then he casts his doubts aside, pops his thumb into his mouth, and reaches over their plates to smear Minho’s lip clean.
Minho squints at him, fork and knife in hand, hood casting shadows on his under eyes.
Jisung shrugs, scrapes his teeth over the flesh of his thumb. Two can play at that game. “Just thought I’d get a taste of my pancakes before they were completely demolished.”
Minho snorts and digs back in. “You’ve had ten minutes to taste them. It’s survival of the fittest out here.” He brandishes his knife at Jisung so the blade glints in the white-cold light of the diner. “If you dare challenge me.”
Jisung doesn’t have the energy to play along, much less face Minho in battle. He only smiles dopily and clinks his knife to Minho’s.
Under the table, their legs are spread. The soles of Jisung’s shoes rest against the tops of Minho’s, gently pinning his feet in place.
Minho puts pressure on his knife, like they’re clashing swords. Then he drops his silverware to the plate, props his elbows on the table. Looks incredibly grave as he tents his fingers in front of his lips.
Jisung slouches backward. “What?”
Minho’s still chewing. And once he’s done, he examines his nails, brows drawn. “You waited for me.”
Waited? But then Jisung gets it—the sleet. Hyunjin. The pub. The gritty coffee.
He tucks his hands into the pockets of his sweats, preventive, lest he start tearing up the napkins or toying with his glass of juice only to spill it. Wouldn’t be the first time.
“I think you’d do that regardless,” Minho murmurs. “You’ve always been so selfless, Jisungie.”
Regardless of…? But Jisung becomes aware of the pulse thudding in his throat, says nothing.
“But… I’ve also felt like… maybe, I don’t know. You look at me a little different now.” The furrow of Minho’s eyebrows is deep now, but then he smiles, twisted and humorless. “And I feel like I’d know, because… I tried for so long to get you to look at me like that.” He pauses. “Long enough to give up.”
Suddenly the clamor of the diner isn’t enough even to masquerade Jisung’s breathing to his own ears. He sits up, a sticky flush spreading over his neck, up into his face.
“I don’t know how I did it.” Minho shrugs, brings his fingers to his mouth to gnaw at the edge of a fingernail. Jisung grabs him by the wrist, holds it down to the table, and Minho scoffs out a laugh. “Was it the dancing? I could see—”
“No,” huffs Jisung, and when Minho only goes to bite at the nails on his other hand, Jisung elbows his plate away to make room to hold both of Minho’s hands in his own. “I mean… sure, that… kind of drove me crazy, but it’s ‘cos it was you.”
Minho’s hands are balled up between his. Jisung sneaks his thumbs into his fists, uncurls them gently.
“I’m being self-pitiful,” says Minho, half-smiling down at the table. “Sorry. Swear I thought I’d grown out of it. Can’t blame anyone but myself, obviously.”
Jisung swallows. “I didn’t know.” Then again, he’s not sure what he would’ve done had he known.
“Good,” Minho says lightly. “You weren’t supposed to. Yeji did, though. I think.” Then he hesitates, clenches his hands up again. “But I… all that time, I really was happy to be your friend, okay? I would’ve never… done anything to jeopardize that. Unless I really thought you wanted me to.” He pulls a hand away to prop his chin up, countenance pensive. “In fact, I… wouldn’t change a thing, you know. Looking back.” Jisung feels Minho look at him, and they lock eyes. “But I hope it doesn’t make you feel weird.” Then Minho’s eyes flicker away. “Or guilty. But mostly I don’t want you to feel… weird. I loved you in so many ways that it was just, um…” Jisung feels a dull throb in his chest when Minho’s voice goes a little shaky. “For me, it was always just about seeing you happy.”
The server slows by their table, coffee pot in hand, but Jisung’s side-eye sends her calmly drifting to the next.
“I was happy,” Jisung cedes. He’d had a good life at home, a good childhood, even before Minho came around. His mom had always made sure of that, tried to fill two parents’ shoes even when Jisung was glad to have just the one. And then he had Yeji and Minho, and he couldn’t have asked for more. He thumbs over the calloused inside of Minho’s palm. “I’m sorry you weren’t.”
“That might be a bit melodramatic.” Minho smiles faintly. “I was, too. I even got over you, you know.” He chuckles into the knuckles pressed up against his lips.
Jisung tries to scoff but mostly just smiles back, soft, looks from one of Minho’s eyes to the other. “Should I be offended?”
Minho’s nose crinkles in thought. “No?” He shrugs. “Think it was for the best, for a while there.”
Jisung nods. Pinches at the pads of Minho’s fingers one by one. “The opposite of over is under.”
“Well done, Milton.”
“Shut up.” Jisung’s lips quirk. “I just mean… what about now?” He looks at Minho, imploring. “Are you still over me? Or are you… under me?”
Minho stares. His cheek dents outward with the press of his tongue, and he covers half his face with his hand. The visible side of his lips is lifted. “I don’t know, Jisung. Where was I a few hours ago?”
Jisung beams, has to tamper it down to something more… socially acceptable. “Fair,” he laughs, still toying with Minho’s fingers. “But that doesn’t really answer my question.”
“Stupid question, stupid answer.”
“That stupid question is a lyric to my next song. I’ve just decided.”
“Stupid song.”
“Even if it’s about you?”
Minho blinks at him, eases his hand back under his chin. “Well, is it,” he lowers his voice, “about fucking me?”
Jisung frowns. “I mean… if I decided to go the traditional ballad route, y’know, tell a story, full-on Carolina Drama it, I’d… want to further research the topic, of course. Very thoroughly.”
Minho gives him an incredibly blank stare. He’s good at those.
Jisung lifts a brow. “Are you—”
“I’m picking up what you’re putting down, yeah, yeah,” mutters Minho, smiling to himself, and he touches Jisung’s wrist before he takes up his fork and knife again.
Jisung watches him saw off a bite from the pancake stack. “It was a stupid way to ask, I know, but…”
Minho’s hood slips off his head as he sits up. He pulls it back on, and around his mouthful, he tells Jisung, “If you’re actually sitting there, telling me you have feelings for me—”
“I have feelings for you.”
Minho looks up from the plate, cheeks bulging with pancake, caught off guard. He swallows before he rasps out, “Okay,” clears his throat as he sets to preparing another forkful. “If that’s true, then… I’m willing to reconsider getting over you.”
Jisung sits on his hands. “Reconsider?”
“I want to be sure you mean it.” Minho is still a moment. “Not that I don’t trust you. I just think… this is different.”
Jisung nods. “I get it.”
“You do?”
“I’m moving out.”
Minho blinks at him again, fork mid-air. “What? Are you—sure?”
Jisung nods again, quicker. “I’ve actually been talking to Seungmin, and he’s got some friend in undergrad who’s spent this last fall studying in Seoul and needs a roommate when he comes back to the city for spring semester, so… yeah. That’s happening.” He smiles tentatively. “You can have your side back.”
“It’s not my side anymore,” mutters Minho, leaning back in the booth.
Jisung hums. “What, you gonna miss me?”
Minho gives him something of a sulky look. “Certainly won’t make it any easier for you to do your research.”
Jisung laughs, presses his feet down on Minho’s toes. “Seungmin will like me more if he sees less of me.”
“That’ll get canceled out when he hears us fucking and likes you less.” Minho hesitates, then casts a harried glance over his shoulder, as if he’s checking for children in the neighboring booth. There are none.
“Then it’ll be like nothing’s changed.”
Minho smiles, rubs his knuckles into his sleepy eye. Jisung coolly quells the urge to clamber over the table, smashing plates in his wake, and take him into his arms. “But everything has,” says Minho. He wets his lip, trains his eyes on Jisung. “Changed. Right?”
Jisung thinks of Minho on a blanket on the beach, on the sidelines at the skate park, on the beanbag in Jisung’s bedroom at home. Minho onstage at the community theater, at his high school graduation, college graduation. At Frost. Minho beside him on the subway, warm through their damp clothes in the midwinter chill.
“Somehow, completely,” Jisung says. “And somehow… not at all.”